Ads sell more than products. They sell values, they sell images. They sell concepts of love and sexuality, of success and perhaps most important, of normalcy. To a great extent, they tell us who we are and who we should be.

The more you subtract, the more you add.

Turning a human being into a thing, an object, is almost always the first step towards justifying violence against that person. It is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to be violent to someone we think of as an equal, someone we have empathy with, but it is very easy to abuse a thing

Girls get the message from very early on that what's most important is how they look, that their value, their worth depends on that. And boys get the message that this is what's important about girls. We get it from advertising. We get it from films. We get it from television shows, video games, everywhere we look. So no matter what else a woman does, no matter what else her achievements, their value still depends on how they look.

The fact is that much of advertising's power comes from this belief that advertising does not affect us. The most effective kind of propaganda is that which is not recognized as propaganda. Because we think advertising is silly and trivial, we are less on guard, less critical, than we might otherwise be. It's all in fun, it's ridiculous. While we're laughing, sometimes sneering, the commercial does its work.

Ads sell more than products. They sell values, they sell images. They sell concepts of love and sexuality, of success and perhaps most important, of normalcy. To a great extent, they tell us who we are and who we should be.

Addiction beggins whith the hope that something 'out there' can instantly fill up the emptiness inside.