Edward Bernays Didn't Sell Cigarettes. He Sold the Feeling of Freedom.

I catch myself treating a purchase like a private decision: the coat, the supplement, the article I share because it "just made sense." Then I remember how often that sense arrived dressed as luck, freedom, or identity—and I go back to the story that starts in 1928, with a man who was proud of steering the public mind.

Edward Bernays was Sigmund Freud's nephew and is often called the father of public relations. He did not mainly argue that ads should list features. He argued that desire could be engineered—and that someone should do it on purpose.

▶ Watch the video: The Secret History of Why You Buy: A Consumer's Guide to Manipulation

From selling a war to selling a feeling

Before the consumer playbook, there was 1917: propaganda as a machine to sell a war. Bernays helped show that mass persuasion could be systematic. After the war, the same toolkit was rebranded as public relations—not less powerful, just better dressed.

In 1928 he published Propaganda, including his idea of an "invisible government" shaping what the crowd believes and wants. Read that line today and it sounds like a conspiracy tweet. In his framing it was a job description.

No discount—a new meaning

The video walks through how Bernays reframed a product by attaching it to a story about who you are. Not "buy this." More like "become this person." That shift matters if you manage budgets at work or scroll at midnight: you are rarely choosing between objects. You are choosing between versions of yourself someone else sketched for you.

For tobacco, the taboo was not only legal or medical. It was social. The campaign did not lead with coupons. It led with symbolism.

Easter 1929: Torches of Freedom

On Easter Sunday 1929, Bernays staged what became known as the Torches of Freedom stunt at the Easter Parade—women smoking in public as a gesture of freedom. The New York Times reported on 1 April 1929 on "Group of Girls Puff at Cigarettes as a Gesture of 'Freedom'."

Historians and public-health sources tie that period to a sharp change in behaviour: women's smoking reportedly rose from about 5% to about 18%. The video asks the question that still stings: who paid for all of it? The answer is not mystical. It is economic. Someone funded the story because the story opened a market.

Scholarship such as Amos and Haglund in Tobacco Control (2000) and Allan M. Brandt's work on "The Engineering of Consent" (1996) documents how consent was built, not discovered.

The same machine, different country

The same logic did not stay in cosmetics and cigarettes. The video connects Bernays's world to Guatemala in 1954, drawing on Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer's Bitter Fruit (1982)—foreign policy sold with public-relations craft. I am not saying every ad is a coup. I am saying the unit incentive is familiar: shape belief first, let transactions follow.

The machine in your pocket

Cut to now: "That's… my feed." The video's fictional rewind ends where most of us live—on the phone. UK Information Commissioner's Office and US Federal Trade Commission findings on Facebook and Cambridge Analytica (2018–2019) are in the source list as a bridge from twentieth-century engineering to algorithmic targeting.

Nobody asked me what I wanted. The feed still feels like mine. That gap is the whole business model.

Before you buy, the video offers three checks I have started using literally:

1. Who is paid to say this?
2. What am I being told I'll become?
3. Who published it?

Comment prompts in the video ask for one purchase you made entirely on your own. I could not name one cleanly. That honesty is uncomfortable, which is why I think the history belongs on a money-and-markets site: markets run on attention, and attention runs on stories.

What I'm watching next

• How "identity marketing" shows up in B2B, not just lipstick and cigarettes—who funds the "thought leadership" you quote in meetings.
• Regulatory follow-through from the 2018–2019 Facebook and Cambridge Analytica findings—what changed in practice versus what changed in press releases.
• The next Torches of Freedom moment: which taboo someone will rebrand as liberation, and which category numbers move if it works.

Bernays did not invent wanting things. He professionalised the link between wanting and narrative—and we are still living in the A/B test. Olivia and Dave in the video are fictional; the history, quotes, and figures in the description are documented. When I feel lucky, I pause. Luck was a brand once. Freedom was a parade stunt. My job is to notice who lit the torch.

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Sources: Amos & Haglund, "From social taboo to 'torch of freedom'", Tobacco Control (2000); Allan M. Brandt, "Recruiting Women Smokers: The Engineering of Consent" (1996); CDC MMWR "Achievements in Public Health, 1900–1999: Tobacco Use" (1999); Larry Tye, The Father of Spin (1998); Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928); The New York Times, 1 April 1929; Schlesinger & Kinzer, Bitter Fruit (1982); UK ICO and US FTC findings on Facebook and Cambridge Analytica (2018–2019).

For information only. Not financial advice.