Advertisements An intelligent person will not allow himself to be influenced by advertisements. Instead, he will try to get

When you see a clever advertisement in a newspaper, do you say to yourself, "Ah, that’s good. I’d like to have one of those"? Or do you say, "What lies are they telling this time? It can’t be very good or they wouldn’t have to advertise it so cleverly?" Both types of people exist: the first are optimists; the second pessimists and realists. Then, how should one deal with advertisements?
   An intelligent person will try to get as much help as he can from advertisements without allowing himself to be influenced against his own interests by them. To do this, he will find out something about the laws regulating advertising in the country in which he lives. Secondly, he will try to learn, from experience and from books, what one can believe in advertisements. When an article claims to be "the best in the world", or to offer "the best value for money in the country", is there any way of proving, or disproving, these claims? If there is not, they can simply be ignored.
   Advertising can be extremely useful if they are honest. If the advertisements are true and accurate, the customers will be satisfied and will probably buy from the same firm next time and advise their friends and acquaintances to do the same. They save a lot of time and trouble by putting sellers in touch with buyers in a quick and simple way. The dishonest advertiser hopes to sell his goods quickly and to make a large profit on them before the customers’ reactions begin. He knows that no customers will buy from him a second time, that none will recommend his products to their friends. But there are also semi-dishonest advertisers who make claims for their products which they know perfectly well to be incapable of verification.
   If there was no advertising, fewer goods would be sold, so the cost of each article would be higher. The more you advertise, the more cheaply you can afford to sell your products. Advertising also encourages makers to improve their goods continually.      As advertisers become more and more expert at their work, they appeal to all the human emotions in the effort to increase sales: greed, jealousy, love of a bargain, fear of the disapproval of other people, fear of ill health, the desire to catch a husband, the desire to show off, and many others. But more and more customers are also becoming suspicious of and resistant to high-powered advertising. This is producing, in highly sophisticated countries, a deliberately modest type of advertisements that is intended to disarm the suspicions of sophisticates by giving an impression of absolute sincerity, or even of deliberate understatement.