If you’ve watched enough TV over the last few years (and I certainly have), you might have noticed the emergence of a strange new breed of advertising: meta-ads. As in an advertisement about advertisement, a commercial that explicitly states that it is a commercial. Characters in these ads say things like “Are we in a Wayfair commercial?” and “That must be a State Farm commercial” and “You riff, or is that part of the commercial?” (It is.) They refer to their script. They relate to how much they are paid. “Oh, I forgot,” they state with mock surprise. “We roll.”

Once you notice these ads, you will see them everywhere. Without even remotely having done a systematic analysis, I can think of more than 30 out of more than a dozen different companies over the last five years. I’m sure I’m missing many more. There’s the Subway campaign, where celebrity speakers keep running out of time to finish their lines. There are the Progressive commercials where Flo the Progressive Lady leads focus groups providing feedback on other Progressive commercials. There’s the Mountain Dew commercial, which featured Chicago Bulls star Zach Lavine and it’s always sunny in Philadelphia lead Charlie Day, both decked out head-to-toe in radioactive-looking Mountain Dew gear, discussing “how obvious product placement is.” There’s Liberty Mutual’s campaign, in which a company spokesman says, “Research shows people remember ads where young people are having fun, so… here’s a pool party” — then a cut to a deliberately absurd pool party with Insurance theme, finished with a devilishly catchy jingle that if you haven’t already heard I strongly caution you to listen.

When the purpose of an ad is to sell you something, these meta ads can sometimes be difficult to analyze exactly how they work. They are not persuasive in a simple, recognizable way. But she do work, or at least the companies that keep making them seem to think so. It turns out that relinquishing persuasion can be just as persuasive as persuasion itself.

Read: When TV Advertising Dominated American Culture

Traditional ads — think mid-century magazine pages and infomercials — seem pretty straightforward. Here is our product. Those are his qualities. You can use it for this and this and this. And it can be yours today for the low price of only $29.99! The problem was that people were starting to assert themselves. As viewers picked up on the tropes, advertisers adapted. They went beyond their basic formula and began employing a much more subtle and sophisticated arsenal of psychological tactics. Cait Lamberton, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, calls this shift the modernist turn in advertising: modernist in the sense that these commercials reject the traditional formal assumptions of advertising. There is no pure sales talent. The appeal is implicit, it’s all about vibes. Think modern car advertising. Think of modern liquor advertising. Think of modern scent advertising. Check out these hot cool people having a great time. Buy this perfume and you too can be so hot and so cool and have a great time. It sounds ridiculous when you spell it, but it works.

However, over time, people have also discovered the tropes of these ads. “If you ask someone in the United States to sketch a storyboard for a product that cleans the glass in your home, they could do it frame by frame,” Lamberton said. Oh no, the kids get their sticky fingers all over the glass coffee table! Don’t worry: Mom or Dad comes here to wipe up. It’s as good as new! Cut to a smiling family and a catchy slogan. “Advertising, like literature, has a very traditional set of storylines,” Lamberton said. “No matter how creative advertisers try to be, there’s often a fallback to the same stories.”

Advertising researchers refer to people’s awareness of these tropes and tactics as persuasion. “When people realize an ad is trying to influence or manipulate them, their defenses go up,” Jake Teeny, a marketing professor at Northwestern University, told me. “Oh, I don’t want to be tricked into doing that.” They become suspicious, and suspicious people are harder to sell.

And so, like philosophers and literary critics before them, advertising became postmodern, adopting a more irreverent tone and ironic attitude towards its modernist predecessors. The goal of meta-ads is to avoid—or at least avoid—trying to activate people’s persuasion. They tiptoe around our skeptical tripwires, undermining the tropes that set them off. Meta-Advertising begins with the premise that modern audiences (or at least those they’re targeting) are too jaded and savvy to fall for traditional ad incentives. They wink at the viewer as if to say: We know you know what we’re doing, so let’s cut the crap and be honest with you. When done well, this has the dual benefit of ingratiating the viewer and building trust in the brand.

Meta ads don’t entirely dispense with the trappings of modernist advertising—far from it. Instead, they rely on those trappings even when they mock them. Feeling smart is a postmodern move. But let that feeling flow into the sale? It’s a plain old-fashioned move, as is marketing a car with scenes of hot people on a sweet road trip. As tongue-in-cheek as they are, meta ads almost always feature warm, personable speakers — Flo the Progressive Lady, Jake From State Farm, the Geico Gecko, various celebrities. They scoff at vibes-based appeals, but they make sure the vibes never go sour. They present a highly calculated brand of authenticity that embodies our generational ethos of honesty – from be real—but they obviously do so to advance corporate interests. Want the real, unfiltered truth? These commercials ask implicitly. Well the truth is that we are trying to sell you this product. So why don’t you go out and buy it?

Meta ads still make up a small minority of TV ads. More traditional approaches continue to work in many cases. Auto advertising has remained almost uniformly modernist, which makes sense: if you have a cool, aesthetically differentiable product, why not show it off? In contrast, insurance ads have waned difficult into the meta approach, which also makes sense: when you’re working with a boring, unsexy product — a product that people can’t even see or touch — you need to get creative. However, not all companies can go meta. “If you’re BP,” Lamberton said, “you can’t make ironic ads about oil spills.”

Eventually, the tropes of postmodern commercials, including meta-ads, will become familiar—even more familiar than they already are. They will trigger our skeptical instincts in the same way that modernist ads did, and advertisers will develop new means of persuasion. (An even wilder, less formally constrained kind of marketing? A hard throwback to sincerity? Who knows!) The parodies themselves are parodied, and we’ll be more likely to recognize them for what they are: attempts to sell us things. Because in the end, no matter how subversive or ironic or metaphorical they get, that’s what advertising is. In the context of a commercial, even demonstrative non-manipulation becomes its own form of manipulation. So when Tom Brady turns to Stephen Curry at the end of a Subway ad and reminds him, “Steph, this is a commercial,” it’s wise to take him at his word.