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NOTHING in this post refers to the original poster! The original post asks a good question and this post intends to address that question, and then goes on to say a lot more.
It doesn't take a conspiracy - or a media mastermind - to sell air conditioners when it's hot outside. It's the season for it.
Given the current climate of the fear of deprivation and the fear of violence, the idea of senselessly silly violence has probably occurred to multiple advertising campaign designers and has then gone on to do well with focus groups. The individuals who come up with these ideas, the members of focus groups, the executives who approve the campaigns and the customers who buy them are all stewing in the same broth right now. The environment makes the joke funny - it's a kind of popular gallows humor, nothing much more than that. It's about making a memorable ad.
My take on the "leggo my Eggo" ads and all their grandchildren (such as the Dew ad) is that what is being played upon is the general self-centered meanness of pop culture. The food running away to avoid being devoured and the portrayal of eating non-meat foods as feminine or effeminate both play upon the ever-shrinking gender role of the American male, and the fear he has of being labeled "queer". The jocks vs. guy singing about vegetables seems to reinforce the "eating vegetables makes you a fag" thought.
The "fairy" SUV ad and most beer commercials play off of this as well: the American straight male's insecurity about his masculinity and heterosexuality are an easy hook to pull on.
Almost all (if not all) manipulation of public opinion depends on finding the hooks people leave sticking out of themselves and attaching ideas to them. Most of those hooks connect to internal fears and insecurities, some to hopes and dreams: fear makes a better, stronger hook than hope, as it's much easier to destroy a hope than to heal a fear. Some of those hooks may connect to mental and spiritual wounds - a person with a sense of unique mission and not much attachement to his own life has a giant hook to pull on, the kind of hook that can be manipulated to produce anything from a heroic firejumper to a U-boat crewman to a suicide bomber. Unscrupulous religion, propaganda, and advertising all work on grabbing those hooks.
The hooks do not work anywhere near as well if the subject to be manipulated is aware of them, as the OP is aware. The manipulation then becomes obvious and can have the opposite effect, particularly if one of the remaining hooks is a fear of being manipulated. Manipulating a person with paranoia concerning unseen actors or conspiracies can be exceedingly touchy. Such a person will take in the message, assume it is spun, and in attempting to "un-spin" the message, create something new out of it. Over time, this can result in a person who is unable to stop looking for the "hidden meaning" in any given message, or who takes any message as really meaning the opposite of its surface meaning. As difficult as it can be to pitch to people with this particular way of hearing and understanding, done correctly, the paranoid can be fierce advocates of the intended message once they get it. Once a paranoid person becomes convinced of a "hidden truth", very little short of drugs and therapy can unconvince him.
A lesser version of the technique of manipulating the paranoid works for selling to the terminally hip. The Blair Witch Project and the marketing for Snakes On A Plane are good examples, as are retail chains Hot Topic and Urban Outfitters. There are enough people who want to be outside the norm that they themselves, in a large enough market, become a market and a new norm in themselves. Present something as "underground" or "counterculture" and it becomes its own form of "hidden truth" or "secret knowledge". Unlike with the paranoid, the terminally hip will dump trends in favor of new trends. The paranoid wants everyone to know his secret truth and will do great work for you in spreading your message, but the hip will junk your trend as soon as it catches on or as soon as the next trend hits. In political propaganda, the cachet of outsiderness has to be presented differently. The trend can't ever be seen to have caught on. In our current political climate, the dominant neocon culture warriors and the more noxious megachurch evangelicals have the hipster hook firmly implanted in their fear of powerlessness, not their fear of being out of the know or uncool. The hipster wears an ironically mass produced pseudovintage t-shirt, and the fundie fights back in the War on Christmas. It's the same trend, same psychology, same hook.
How a fundie doesn't know he's part of a mass movement while attending a church the size of a stadium, I can't understand any more than how a twentysomething neopunk who bought his beat up studded belt off of a rack in a national chain store thinks he's a unique and special snowflake. I don't understand how that works, but I understand that it does: I suspect it has something in common with the mechanism behind Stockholm Syndrome, but several levels removed. Convincing people that what you are telling them is more true than their own personal experience, getting them to trust that the world as described on the radio, the TV, or from the pulpit more than they trust the world as seen in their own neighborhood is moving on from the elementary to the intermediate level of propaganda.
The advanced Jedi mind trick level of political, religious, or marketing B.S. is getting people to believe two or more completely contradictory and self-cancelling ideas at the same time. This is rarely achieved in the commercial world, but the US beer industry has managed to associate drinking watery yellow pilsener with both defending against womanliness and attracting feminine women. In unscrupulous religious politics, a contradictory idea-pair is "America is a Christian nation" and "Christians are persecuted in America". This is not the same as the concept of cognitive dissonance, in which the idea is to create the tension of dissonance with the preparatory ideas (drown them yourself) and then to resolve the tension with the end-goal idea (sell them the life preserver). The idea is to break down the logical mind and stop the process of internal logic checking. This subject, when forced to compare ideas, will either not see the conflict or will react with anger at the person who disrupted the peace of his confusion. The subject's anger will be turned toward the counterpropagandist who points out the contradictions, and his discomfort will be turned toward the process of thinking itself. Eventually, he becomes an emotionally driven creature , off balance enough to be pushed with a breath. When, or if, he is out of the situation and able to think again, he will be shocked at the absurdity of his own beliefs.
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