Is Logoless advertising in our future?

I'm a bit sick of seeing logos everywhere. I try to ignore them. "Branding" is one of the big things in marketing. I worked in marketing departments for a few companies and they love "branding", although I can say that most marketing people love buzz words, but have no clue on how to apply them.

I was listening to Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, by Martin Lindstrom in the car and he talked about logoless advertising. Apparently tobacco companies have been logoless advertising for years and it works amazingly well. They simply show images associated with their brand and people's brains are activated.

Lindstrom calls this a form of subliminal advertising. Traditional advertising theory says you should show your logo. You should brand yourself. But Lindstrom says people simply use their brains to reject the logo or dispute the advertising claim.

When you don't show a logo, the brain has nothing to dispute. The ad is too subtle. Therefore, it's much more effective.

My own thought is that very few companies have enough market recognition to go logoless. Maybe Coca Cola could (just show the red stripe and scenes of people having fun), perhaps Pepsi, perhaps McDonald's.

My second thought is that marketing executives are way too much in love with their logo to even consider going logoless.

What I could see happening in the near future is companies getting rid of their text. McDonald's could just show the golden arches. Macintosh could just show the apple (wait, don't they already do that - I guess this is already starting to happen). Pepsi could show that smiley head.

While it would be nice to live in a logoless world, it wouldn't be nice if the logoless ads were even more powerful than the ones with logos. Then I'd want the logos back so I could reject them with my brain and retain some sort of consumer "freedom".

Maybe logos aren't all that bad.