From the furore over ‘body-shaming’ adverts such as Protein World’s Tube posters to criticism of YouTube vlogger Zoella for promoting junk food, there have been growing calls for tougher regulations on advertising that promotes unhealthy lifestyles - with children and young people regarded as particularly vulnerable to such messages.

Public health campaigners have suggested the UK should adopt France’s tough loi evin laws, which prohibit alcohol advertising on film and television, along with sponsorship of sports and other profile events. Following on from the coalition government’s decision to introduce plain packaging for cigarettes, some suggest that the ideas should extend even to foods with high salt or fat content. Adverts for such foods are already banned around TV shows aimed at children. Increasingly advertising is being held to account for the social ills it is seen to create. There have been accusations that adverts are promoting eating disorders and sexism through increasingly sexualised imagery, with the Advertising Standards Authority repeatedly banning American Apparel for the use of especially youthful looking models.

Advertisers respond that the UK’s restrictions are already amongst the toughest in the Western world. Critics counter, however, that internet advertising is unfairly able to circumvent such regulations and actively encourages advertisers to flout them in the hope of generating viral outrage. Yet some say this is hardly a bad thing, that advertising is a perfectly legitimate and creative form of entertainment, which invariably makes consumers choose between products rather than manufacture new desires. Yet from Vance Packard’s 1957 best-seller, The Hidden Persuaders, there persists a cultural anxiety that advertisers are engaged in underhand methods to sell us their wares: for Packard’s ‘motivational research’ back then, read contemporary ‘neuro-marketing’ today. On the other hand, today’s advertisers are also equally keen to assert their ability to sell the ‘social good’ to people, ranging from the likes of Dove’s ‘Real Beauty’ campaigns promoting good female body image through to increasingly hard-hitting NGO awareness campaigns and the promise to ‘nudge’ us into healthier behaviour.

Is today’s discomfort around advertising rooted less in the marketing techniques themselves than the products they sell? Or does there remain an unease that a new brand of neuro-marketers will continue to find sinister new ways to sell us products we never knew we wanted? Does concern around advertising generally reveal more about contemporary anxieties over free will and morality rather than the mad men’s malign influence, or does the digital age require a tougher framework than ever before? Where does the line fall between good salesmanship and outright dishonesty?