Success Quote by Michael Schudson

Advertising, Schudson reminds us, doesn’t win because it’s brilliant; it wins because it’s filling a vacuum. His claim is almost clinical: persuasion scales with ignorance. The sharper edge is the implicit reversal of the industry’s self-mythology. Ads love to pose as “information” - helpful, comparative, empowering. Schudson’s line treats that posture as conditional theater: advertising functions best when it faces the least competition from other forms of knowledge.

The subtext is about power in the ecology of attention. A “consumer’s information environment” isn’t just personal savvy; it’s the surrounding infrastructure: independent journalism, regulation, consumer reports, word-of-mouth networks, transparent labeling, searchable reviews, strong libraries, even time to research. When those supports are weak or absent, advertising doesn’t need to persuade so much as define the problem and supply the only visible solution. It becomes a substitute for literacy in the broad civic sense.

Contextually, this lands in a late-20th-century conversation about consumer culture that refused the comforting idea that people are simply duped by slick messaging. Schudson’s sociology aims at the system: markets are not neutral arenas where “better ads” win; they’re environments engineered by asymmetries. The quote also reads like a quiet warning for the digital age. We’re drowning in content, yet “information impoverishment” can still be engineered through paywalls, algorithmic narrowing, influencer laundering, and regulatory retreat. Advertising thrives not in silence, but in curated scarcity - when the loudest voice sounds like the only voice.