The primary goal of advertising and marketing, of course, is to shape our behavior; advertising agencies can be looked at as hired guns, whose main job is to destroy consumer resistance and shape consumer desire and action -- whether it be to sell cigarettes, beer, politicians, or, lately, prescription medicines. And in some cases, it is to sell socially positive messages. There is little question that the information advertisers have about consumer motivation and the minds of consumers is a source of power. Is this power used ethically and for constructive purposes? That is the question. (135)

The answer to my question would have to be a little bit of both. While some advertisers try to show that their product will be beneficial to everyday life, such as the dishsoap that improves the look and feel of your hands in five uses, others try to make you think that you need to upgrade to you don't have to work as hard, such as the razor with the bar of soap on the end replacing shaving cream. Other ads try to play on the emotion, and some even degrade their audience then retaliate by saying "if you buy this product, you won't look like such a dumb person," or something similar.

Berger makes a comment, saying that the president of a large advertising company once said "even lousy advertising works" on page four of his book. I think what he means by that is that advertising works 100% of the time, not because they all make you buy something, but that they can all make themselves known to the consumer. Even the most ridiculous advertisements make the consumer say to themselves, "Gosh, that was the worst ad ever," and they're going to remember that particular ad.

As far as ethics go, I think that most commercials are done for ethical purposes. Ethical critics can usually have a look at something and make the decision of whether or not an ad is ethical. The definition of ethical critics, as said in the glossary at the end of the book on page 189, is "ethical critics deal with texts such as advertisements in terms of the moral aspects of what happens in these texts and the possible impact of these advertisements on those exposed to the texts and on others." For example, in order to get the word out that shaking a baby is deadly in an appropriate way, a commercial may run or a billboard may depict a baby crying - not a person shaking a life-like replica of a baby. That'd be pushing the limits, as would somebody performing any sort of abuse.