When I was around 6 years old, I was into television ads.

TV was in general fascinating then. That was before color sets, before we shortened the name of the miracle to TV, long before cable or dishes or even UHF. In the beginning there were three networks, and NBC was on top.

I’m sure there must have been commercials for cars and booze, and I can vaguely remember the cigarette ads, but the ones I really noticed were for breakfast cereals and toothpastes.

Without now resorting to the Internet for data, I can recall the way the Malt-O-Meal people used the Colonel Bogey March. I can bring back the Quaker ads for their puffed cereals, with cartoon cannons firing the grains to the booms of the 1812 Overture. I remember Jets, made by the same folks as Kix but of wheat instead.

And then there was Ipana toothpaste, with its big flat cap so it could stand on its head. Or Gleem, which must have been the first to promise the best whitening. Or good old Crest. Their blurb (“Crest has been shown to be an effective decay-preventing dentifrice which, when used in a conscientiously applied program of oral hygiene …” (I could go on!)) was every bit as contagious and actually similar to the Superman prologue (“… and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights a never-ending battle for …”).

Crest and Colgate were battling for dominance then. Crest was clearly on top. But it didn’t seem to be the ads that put it there. It seemed like all dentists were recommending Crest and giving away free little tubes of it. Crest appeared to be the only product applying flouride (this was before dentists began painting it on or water companies began adding it). While I wasn’t paying attention, sometime in the last several decades, Colgate pulled ahead.

I liked the ads, but they never caused me to buy something. And as far as I could see, they didn’t influence folks around me either. Families bought Crest or Colgate, Ford or Chevy, Pepsi or Coke, based on what they were used to or perhaps a trusted recommendation. We liked the clever ads, we even talked about them with admiration, but we didn’t buy.

Maybe we are a different demographic group than the folks born after us. We kind of co-evolved with ads. Evolutionary history tells us that, where big animals evolved with people (Africa and Europe), they survived by learning to be wary of us. In other places, like Australia or the Americas, the big draft animals had no idea how deadly people were. They stood around and got slaughtered.

My generation grew up with the ad industry. Maybe we’re wary. Maybe we’re too skeptical to sip from that fist.