How would you distinguish corporation influencing consumers from corporations following consumers? One thing would be to see if there are items that are heavily advertised by corporations but that they do not succeed. You can also take items that everyone knows about, no one wants, and then launch a propaganda campaign and see what happens. Different propaganda works in different ways so one would need to try varieties. I imagine a randomly controlled trial of having various ubiquitous goods that are not heavily advertised nor heavily purchased and then randomly assigning different advertising strategies (including none). Do that in various regions, countries, ethnicities, etc, and then see what can be seen.

My guess is that advertising raises desire by a few percent in most cases. There would be some instances of a run away craze, probably with a massive rise followed by a collapse, but that most products would largely be unaffected. I assume some advertising strategies would backfire and reduce demand.

For me, I feel like most of the time it is been exposed to the existence of an item and my ability to see how it could be useful. I don't think random advertisements I come across impact me that much since most of the advertisements I see don't seem to correspond to anything I want or do or spend money on.

Humans use their imagination to figure out what choice of action leads to a future of less uncomfortability. Often times, these are choices between short term future and long term future. Advertising is a way of helping shape that argument as to what choice is to be taken, but the underlying drive is already there.

You could also look for cases where propaganda is used against consumerism and see how impactful that tends to be.

I'm not convinced. Propaganda only works when it relies on something that people are dispositionally inclined towards. eg: hating foreigners, calls towards group unity, etc.

You can't use propaganda to trick people into becoming experts at calculus, for instance.