If the message itself wasn’t bad enough, what we now have is this homogenised message of mindless consumption being something we are cocooned and immersed in from cradle to grave. Living in a city, in particular, every where we go, bus stops, urinals, subways, stairs, etc., we are pelted with advertising visuals in our faces; it’s a kind of visual vandalism. On TV, online and on our smart phones, the same goes. We have passively accepted that advertising is just something we must endure if we want to watch a certain YouTube video or football on the TV. As it is so pervasive, we can easily slip into a false sense of feeling disconnected to its impact, and not being aware of the function of the message often is for us not to consciously take note, but rather to allow the images, sounds and visual and audio cues to embed their message into our subconscious minds. The claim that “advertising doesn’t affect me” doesn’t reconcile with the billions spent on advertising for the reasons it does, in fact, affect you.(…) Creating a culture that is consumption-focused, disconnected from the present, objectifies beauty, strips us of gratitude and instils an essentially shallow and materialist mindset. That would be just some of the mental and emotional costs. Then we look at how turbo consumption is accelerating us off the cliff of climate catastrophe. Advertising distract us form the dire striates, whilst simultaneously greasing the wheels to propel us even quicker into those dire straits.

E.F. Nicholson, Why advertising is a form of cultural pollution, Things-that-matter.net