We barely pay attention to ads anymore. We see so many of them and we employ so much technology to push them to the sidelines that advertisements today fail to attain the emotional impact they once had.

Sure, we can instantly recall the most memorable marketeering slogans of our youth — “Where’s the beef?” “Mikey likes it,” “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” — but oh, how things have changed.

It’s those good old days, when ads spoke to us and got lodged in our heads, that are the focus of Doug Pray’s new unrated documentary, Art & Copy. While the film suffers from taking the long view into the past and largely ignoring the explosion of digital advertising, it’s still a fascinating look at an industry built around selling not just products, but emotions, ideas and lifestyles.

Pray’s earlier movies include Hype, a history of the Seattle grunge scene in the 1990s, and Scratch, a study of turntable culture in hip-hop and electronic music. Pray’s last effort was 2007’s Surfwise [User Rating:7.4/10], a family history of surfer and doctor Dorian Paskowitz that was equal parts hilarious and disturbing.

With Art & Copy, Pray shifts gears a bit and takes a look at a culture that’s been with us for centuries but has only really come into its own over the last 40 or 50 years.