For 25 years, my job has been making things travel in marketing.

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I launched the teen show Skins on MySpace back when a social network still felt like a novelty, the first time it was used to market TV in the world. I spent every year since working out why one message gets carried by millions of people while another often sinks without a trace.

So when Andy Burnham stood up at the United Nations on Tuesday night and announced a National Centre for Information Defence, I listened as someone who knows how that machinery works, after a career operating it for brands.

He is right about the scale. Burnham said the Kremlin spends £1.3 billion a year manipulating information through bots, fake websites and forged branding of British organisations. The proposed centre will bring intelligence agencies, police and the platforms together to "detect, attribute and disrupt" hostile-state attacks, and I think it is overdue.

But anyone who has worked in advertising knows that finding the lie is only part of the battle. The most effective disinformation works like the best advertising, through a drip, drip, drip of the same suggestion repeated until it stops sounding like a claim and starts sounding like something everybody knows.

Psychologists have understood this since the late 70s, when researchers found that the more often we hear a........

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