It's a false claim often made by marketing people that marketing is synonymous with persuasion and the propagation of ideas. That without marketing everything is doomed to obscurity and irrelevance. Well, that may be true for an increasing number of areas of life in the world that marketing has built but it isn't generally. You've heard of Quantum Mechanics, right? Do you think it says something valid about the world? Did anyone ever market it to you?

Marketing is a fundamentally shallow form of communication. It's the forcing of awareness of something onto people without their choosing to be aware of it. The payload is necessarily low in information content, the interaction is brief and the message is dressed up to be maximally attention-grabbing. These things have negative results, and those negative results become worse the more pervasive marketing gets. The fact that people have always done it doesn't make it good, or make it desirable to allow an unlimited amount of it into our society.

It's worse in modern times for a couple of reasons. One is that our society consumes more information than ever before, and we've made a Faustian bargain with marketing to fund the generation of that information. Another is that marketing drags everything down to its level - the presence of these shallow, maximally distracting signals forces others to do the same in order to be heard. The transformation of politics into marketing (marketed as "inevitable" or "the way it's always been" by marketers) is a case in point. It's cancerous, and I'm glad people are finally waking up to it.