notes, they didn't give a damn whether anybody drank the stuff or not.At this point, PBR exists entirely as a brand, its contents brewed, if that's the word, by mega-corp Miller. The beer that used to have appeal because it had no character has now become a beer that does not really exist.Well, so what? Spectral marketing, with the product effectively redundant because the brand is what is purchased, is so familiar to today's consumers that the original kind of advertising, the sort depicted on the cable television show Mad Men, looks like a form of quaint mythology. You mean they used to try and make people believe that products would make them happier?The PBR campaign generated brand-consciousness by stealth rather than glamour, that is, by the anti-glamour known as cool, but that too is familiar. Both glamour and cool are positional goods: They are enjoyed when someone lacking recognizes our possession of them. Glamour involves races to the top that become races to the bottom; cool involves races to the outside that create new forms of inside.The striking note in all this is the mention of Ms. Klein's book, a runaway bestseller that crystallized youthful hostility to the big sell and was part of wide-scale protests over globalization. The book is invariably described as "an anti-corporate manifesto," which it surely is. It has also become, despite itself, a manual for branding's evolution even as its author has moved on to more searching critiques of capitalism.The Klein co-optation is more than just the corporate world's usual strategy of assassination by assimilation. Marketers now use the levers of criticism against themselves, making branding better by embracing, rather than ignoring, their harshest opposition. On this model, the logic of rebellion is the engine of market success, not a sabot tossed into its machinery.Marketers have thus become viruses or, more crudely, urban raccoons. Just as inoculations create more resistant superbugs, as strains adapt to harsher countermeasures, more elaborate anti-invasion devices on garbage cans force raccoons to adapt. And our criticism of branding's tactics is generating new and more elusively successful campaigns. We make raccoons smarter with every new arrangement of bungee cord or wire; we make marketers smarter every time we resist a visible lure because that forces adaptation to invisible ones.Unlike raccoons, young marketers are not cuter than their older, bigger parents. And they sift through our psyches and pocketbooks rather than our gardens and garbage cans. But does it really matter that we're constantly being sold things, and increasingly by turning our own desires against us?One sign that it does matter comes with another premise of Rob Walker's book, what we might call the Exceptionality Fantasy. Most people believe they themselves are immune from marketing tactics even as they note the sad susceptibility of other people. I tested the EF on myself and it held: I drink Starbucks coffee because it tastes good; you drink Tim Hortons because you have bought into nostalgia and sham nationalism. Now you try.The EF obtains despite, indeed precisely because of, the success of "revelatory" books about the