Whereas intellectuals and militants devoted much of their efforts to criticizing advertising in the 1970s, this criticism suddenly disappeared during the first half of the 1980s. This article explains that turning point by examining the case of consumer organizations, with a particular focus on the normative constructions on which consumerist criticism of advertising is based. It shows that as a consequence of technical, cultural and professional changes affecting advertising in the eighties, and their translation into court action, consumer activists suddenly witnessed the disintegration of the critical affordances that they had developed in the seventies.