True, but advertisers promote images they believe are likely to be effective and that belief is based on something. Not every ad campaign will work. Not any amount of advertising would have sold small, fuel-efficient cars in the fifties/sixties. And there IS a cultural subconscious: how else to explain the adolescent tendency to wear the uniform of the oppressed in every era: ethnic wear and army jackets in the sixties and early seventies, bag lady clothes in the eighties, ghetto huge dragging pants in the nineties?
I didn't say these were rational, conscious choices; but just because they aren't doesn't mean they are meaningless.
Joanna B.