I start this paper with an assumption: Advertising is a very powerful form of social communication in modern society. It offers the most sustained and most concentrated set of images anywhere in the media system. The question that I wish to pose and attempt to give an answer to from this assumption is what lies behind the considerable power that advertising seems to have over its audience. Particularly I wish to do this without reverting back to one-dimensional explanations of manipulation and the use of sophisticated techniques by advertisers. I do not want to deny this element (there is of course a huge amount of accumulated knowledge in the advertising industry concerning persuasion) but I wish to probe culturally rather than tecnhically.

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