evil, evil persuaders

Last night I finished reading a section of this book about how public relations works. Though the author qualifies the beginning of the section that public relations (which, by the way, is one of my majors) is not unethical per se, it seems to me that her hatred for the practice is thinly veiled.

I've found this sort of animosity applies to graphic designers as well. In fact, almost anybody who works in a field that involves either persuasion or communicates on a subconscious level seems to attract a certain level of distrust. It seems as though decades after Freud introduced the idea that humans have a subconscious and are not wholly in control of themselves, we are still rather uncomfortable with the idea. And we still like to dismiss Freud entirely as hopelessly sexist and ethnocentric, even though he was just as much a product of his sexist and ethnocentrist culture as we are of our culture, whatever that may be.

I think there's a difference between persuasive techniques and the message, or intent, they communicate. Are the persuasive techniques that aim to convince you to buy their company's SUV, different from the persuasive techniques used to get you to donate to a reputable nonprofit, or to give up smoking?

Is the fault of advertising encouraging a consumer mindset a problem within the individual advertisement, or the aggregate onslaught of all advertisements? If the latter, how do we hold individual advertisers accountable?