Once upon a distant memory, two then-celebrated science fiction writers imagined a Malthusian future where “by the people” governments had been supplanted by “for the shareholders” ad agencies, sales messages screamed from every screen, and brand loyalty was so engrained in the law of the land that that even your morning coffee would come laced by, quoting here, “a mildly addictive alkaloid.”

Flash forward to the present folly, and in what’s either reality imitating fiction or some of those “who’s up on the roof” jitters you get when someone saunters across your grave, we might be damn close to that 1950s flight of anti-fancy. 

At least, if the frame of reference is this year’s Kantar BrandZ list of the “world’s most valuable” brands.

The reason: Amazon (#1), Google (#2), and Facebook (#6) all make a huge percentage of bank by acting as 3rd party representatives (aka agents) in placing marketing messages (aka, advertising) for businesses and organizations (aka clients). Writ simply, they aren’t just tech behemoths and massive media publishers—they’re also the world’s largest ad agencies.

This is what happens when you take a trip to the other side of the looking glass, tracking footsteps in the deeply layered dust. Call it dystopian irony or maybe just eerie prescience, but from an installed base that vastly exceeds the populations of whole nations, to category players acting with quasi-governmental authority, to algorithms designed to hook you into digital dependency, we’re damned close to Dorian Gray’s portrait reaching a sprightly seven decades and looking just like life. 

All of which might, or might not, turn out to be permanent. For one thing, there’s a rising anti-monopolistic and pro-regulatory tide that portends tectonic shifts in ad tech. For another, The Reductionist has a theory that the pendulum of dominance in the marketing marketplace could eventually swing back to more creative-centric purveyors.

That is, if we’re smart about things. Seeing that reductio ad absurdum data granularity is going to force us to build around human commonalities, not marginal media differences. Dialing into the truth that you can’t out-compete companies that pretty much own “new, exciting, and innovative” with stale and formulaic crap. Maybe even loosening our decades-old death-grip on the sanctity of interruption since it hasn’t exactly scored relative homers against platforms built to deliver integrated and satisfying.

So, okay, this isn’t the first time that improbable science fiction has slithered its way into concrete and discernable fact. Nor is the picture all that neatly cut and dried. But when you think about what happens when the means of persuasion and the distribution of promotion are concentrated in a few gigantic paws, we might have a good reason to want to see the ad industry take back a little of its own.

By the way, in case you’re wondering, the story of an Earth run by ad shops was first published in 1952 under the anodyne title of “The Space Merchants.” Wiki’s fun fact is that the authors wanted to call it “Gravy Planet” which is not only more evocative, but explains the headline on this post. Then again, you really can’t gainsay an editor’s choices—left to his own devices, Tolstoy wanted to call “War and Peace” by the less-than-original “All’s Well That Ends Well.” Maybe it was a nod to readers thinking, “Thank the Tsar, this endless thing is over.”