Image Advertising
Much of advertising today relies on what's in customer's heads, image advertising. You can sit through 27-seconds of a TV commercial and still not know what product it's selling. (if it's difficult to tell what a commercial is selling, it's even tougher to decipher all the commercial messages in a news program, film, magazine, video game, etc.)
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These sorts of ads aren't selling products so much as brand names or images. When was the last time you saw a jeans ad that mentioned sturdy cloth or washability? Granted, close fit and ability-to-attract nearly naked supermodels are a plus, but differences between brands are largely matters of perception and packaging, not jeans' material attributes. This sometimes works even for products such as cars or computers. When customers lack the technical expertise to know substantial differences, they may gravitate toward the "hip" machine, the "unique" car, the one with "personality." The higher tech and more info-dense our culture gets, the more this will tend to be the case. Despite consumer cynisim, despite our ability to creatively read advertising and see through crap, image advertising very often works. You're reading some right now.
