According to Don Draper, “Kids today, they have no one to look up to, ‘cause they’re looking up to us”. This week, Madison Avenue has taken a blow from the unlikeliest of crusaders, Morgan Spurlock, in POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. In this audacious if wildly tacky follow-up to the David and Goliath triumph of Supersize Me, Spurlock’s pitch is simple: to make a movie financed entirely by product placement.

With a discerning time of release which will resonate in the Occupy Wall Street zeitgeist, Spurlock’s latest documentary is both a pitiless satirisation of the ad industry, and a remarkably well-conceived allegory on the erosion of art by commerce. As he shamelessly drags his cameraman from one corporate giant to the next in the hope of sponsorship, one gets the impression that Spurlock is punching well above his political weight.

We have come a long way from the premise that fast food is bad for you; Spurlock has stumbled into a cultural and economic minefield, and yet his (possibly) faux-ignorance is the documentary’s silver bullet. In positioning himself firmly in the stance of impartial observer, he allows the advertising moguls and CEOs he interviews to be their own undoing. With an Average Joe-ism sourced straight from the school of Louis Theroux, Spurlock heaps irony upon irony, as his learned clients squirm in the face of his proposals.

The catch is, that in refusing to sign up for Spurlock’s movie based on grounds of integrity, firms are suggesting that the product placement they themselves engage in every day is in some way reprehensible. They are backed into a lose-lose moral predicament. In fact the real winners are those who did accept – POM Wonderful pomegranate juice gets so much airtime I nearly picked up a bottle on the way home.

Aside from drawing some comedy gold from witless financiers – “What if by the time your film comes out, we look like a bunch of blithering idiots?”, the film is clearly intended to be fodder for a wider debate. With interviewees from Quentin Tarantino to Donald Trump, the label of ‘sell-out’ is explored, with even the band OK Go plugging their almost-but-not-really ironic soundtrack single for the film, entitled The Greatest Song I Ever Heard. Sell-out indeed.

Product placement is a force which has crept into our lives with intimidating stealth. Spurlock presents a dizzying array of even the most respected films and television shows, through which corporations have auctioned shares in the consumer subconscious. He describes the infiltration of dialogue with slogans and sponsored name-dropping as the ‘most egregious’ of all artistic transgressions, citing 90210 as a prime offender (not that it had a lot of artistic integrity to start with). AMC’s Mad Men, despite being a clear forerunner in the debate, is interestingly never disparaged nor even referenced. Perhaps Spurlock felt this was an adversary too great, or that it might serve to undermine his argument. As one of the few truly acclaimed programmes to be littered with commercial interest, Mad Men circumvents any danger of slander by making the product part of the art. The show genuinely wouldn’t work without brand referencing, indeed it brings authenticity to the era, and any financial interest is purely incidental, or so the writers would have you believe.

Despite being at the cutting-edge of anti-consumerism, and perhaps a little piece of history, the film relentlessly pursues one side of what is really a far more complex argument. To assume that sponsorship correlates necessarily with declining quality is naïve; brands and art have long been intertwined, and can in some cases be the making of one another. Nevertheless, Spurlock’s agenda is radical and necessary, and despite the deliberate bad taste with which it is put together, the film is not to be underestimated. Shots of the advertisement-free vistas of São Paolo are mesmerising; a living utopia in which corporate oppression is vanquished by meritocracy and creative freedom.

“Morgan Spurlock thinks all Americans are idiots”, asserts one CEO, “He thinks that all the people sponsoring this film are idiots.” His firm agreed to a product placement deal shortly afterwards.