Osric Digital Founder Publishes Essay Asking “Is Advertising Propaganda?”
New York, NY – October 29, 2026 – Osric Digital, a paid media agency for B2B tech and services companies, has published “Is Advertising Propaganda?“, a long-form essay by founder Dominick DeJoy. The essay asks whether advertising fits philosopher Jason Stanley’s definition of propaganda in How Propaganda Works (2015), and what the answer means for B2B advertisers.
Stanley defines propaganda as a message that presents itself as embodying an ideal, such as health, liberty, or objectivity, while endorsing that ideal by nonrational means. His most damaging category, undermining propaganda, invokes an ideal while working against it. Stanley gives advertising about a page, built on two invented examples. DeJoy’s essay argues that a real answer requires first building an account of how advertising actually works.
For that account, the essay turns to The Anatomy of Humbug (2015) by longtime agency planner Paul Feldwick, which catalogs six common explanations of how advertising works. These explanations are salesmanship, seduction, salience, social connection, spin, and showbiz.
DeJoy tests each lens against Stanley’s test. Salience and showbiz, the ads built on memory and spectacle, borrow no ideal and thus fall outside Stanley’s definition of propaganda. Salesmanship and seduction can go either way depending on execution. Spin, illustrated by Edward Bernays’s orchestration of Light’s Golden Jubilee for General Electric in 1929, sits closest to propaganda.
The essay closes by discussing B2B advertising. B2B advertising messaging often leans on ideals like being data-driven, efficient, or built for growth, while claims about the business impact of new software and AI products are often speculative. DeJoy argues that the caveat emptor ethos common in B2B tech assumes the efficient markets hypothesis taught in neoclassical economics departments and at business schools. This assumption looks weaker as platform oligopolies grow in power and the line between advertising and editorial blurs.
One potential objection is that propaganda generally refers to political communication. A follow-up article will engage with Network Propaganda (Faris, Roberts and Benkler, 2018), which proceeds according to this premise.
Before founding Osric Digital in 2021, he managed paid media in-house at Preqin, a fintech focused on private equity markets In addition to his role as principal at Osric Digital, DeJoy frequently comments on digital media and creative labor and is commonly seen on the conference circuit.
“For most working advertisers, the answer is mostly no—their ads are not propaganda,” said Dominick DeJoy, founder of Osric Digital. “Building memory and earning attention don’t require borrowing anyone’s ideals. But in B2B in particular, it’s common to make ROI-focused arguments that borrow the vocabulary and tone of disinterested scientific disputation, but are really filled with loaded reasoning and skewed data. That is inherently problematic, but the industry is in a bit of a race-to-the-bottom at the moment, particularly given the demand to ‘be data-driven’ at all costs.”
About Osric Digital
Osric Digital is a B2B paid media agency running Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Meta Ads for B2B tech and services companies, including SaaS, fintech, HR tech, legal, cleantech, and professional services firms. Founded in 2021 by Dominick DeJoy, the agency works with Series A and later companies spending $10K to $100K per month on media. It builds full-funnel programs that cover everything from brand awareness to demand capture.
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Company Name: Osric Digital
Contact Person: Dominick DeJoy
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Address:169 Madison Ave STE 2973
City: New York
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Website: https://www.osricdigital.com/
