Chapter 4 examines the dialectical relationship between the rhetorical tactics of modern advertising and the performance strategies of the avant-garde. While scholars have established the influence of print advertising on Dada’s collage aesthetic, little attention has been paid to the industry’s influence on the theatrical provocations of the historical avant-garde. This chapter demonstrates how the performance repertoire of early twentieth-century advertising - in the joking assault of the street tout, the insinuated intimacy of the shill, the manufactured cultural authority of the puff, and the provocation of plants in the audience - offered a model of social engagement that avant-garde artists adopted in order to reveal the internal logic and rhetorical strategies of consumer capitalism. Entering into critical debates about the so-called neo-avant-garde, this chapter concludes by establishing a line of continuity between the historical and contemporary avant-gardes, demonstrating how avant-garde artists in post-socialist China likewise inhabit advertising’s performance repertoire when they emulate the abject logic of the shanzhai (“copycat”) to reveal how transnational capitalism is transforming social relations within the globalizing economy.