Advertising is very different from what most people believe it is.

Ads aren’t out there to raise awareness, at least not for major products. Your local dry cleaner may need an ad, but Coke and Ford don’t. New products are excuses for them to put out ads, but they’re not there to inform you of the products. They’re just opportunities, a source of advertising content. But it’s not like they’d stop advertising just because they don’t have a new product.

Advertising is about nudges, not shoves. They don’t want to jar your mind into a decision: “Hey, I hadn’t heard of the new Chevy Megalopago. Let’s go buy one!”

Rather, what they want is to nurture an idea. They want to make you comfortable. They want you to see a package of Doritos on the shelf and think, “Yeah, that’s what I want, even though it’s not on my shopping list.” You’re not thinking of the ad at that moment. You’re not thinking of any specific thing. But you’ve been conditioned by a barrage of ads to find Doritos familiar.

The ultimate example of this is the political yard sign. They often feature nothing more than the candidate’s name. You know nothing about their positions. You wouldn’t read a yard sign that gave anything more than a three-word vague message.

And yet they do it, because it works. Just having seen the sign plants the seed in your mind. “People like this candidate. There are so many signs that they must be important.” Even just the fact that you recognize the name on the ballot will give you the impression that you know something about this candidate, and that the others are unknowns and unimportant.

Before advertisers figured this out, they used words to convince you that this was a good product:

Now, it’s just a picture, and maybe a few words… plus the name of the product.

The ad can amuse, and create a momentary positive feeling of engagement with the product. The Got Milk campaign did that, too. But they don’t really expect you to say, “That amused me. I should buy it.” They want a vague positive feeling about the product so that you buy it without thinking.

You don’t need to know the benefits of milk. If they happen to include some, it’s just an excuse for them to put out an ad.

What they want is to put the name of the product in front of you, to have the name wandering vaguely though your mind. When you go to the fridge and think, “I want a drink”, that slight nudge means you might pick milk rather than the Kool-Aid or water or soda.

You’ll never think, “I picked the milk because I saw it in an ad.” If you did, the advertiser has actually failed in their aim.

And the really critical part: when you use up the milk, you’ll put it on the shopping list, and buy more. Not because you’re craving milk, but because you have a vague notion that milk is just something you buy. It’s automatic.

It has to be constantly refreshed, and constantly built into each new generation. It doesn’t cause sudden surges of new customers. But it creates a constant, continuous stream, which is actually better for them. Their product is perishable, and they want a predictable flow of users. Which means keeping it up.

You probably think you’re immune to such things. Advertisers love that. They want you to believe that you’re immune to the manipulation. You genuinely believe you’re making your choices totally uninformed by the ads. You genuinely think you’re buying it solely because you’ve rationally considered the alternatives and arrived at a purely logical choice.

That makes you the strongest possible customer, because you’ll twist yourself into knots to justify the choice to preserve your sense of yourself as a rational person. There were a million beverage choices you could have made, and you picked one without really considering 999,995 of them for even an instant, despite your firm belief that you did.

That doesn’t mean the milk industry isn’t selling a fine product. They are. You’ll enjoy drinking it, and if it isn’t quite so good for you as they might lead you to believe, it’s still quite a healthy and beneficial thing.

But its producers advertisers don’t really care about that. They’re professional manipulators. And if they don’t manipulate you into buying their product, you will be manipulated into buying somebody else’s. Because you are far, far more manipulable than you believe you are.

The only way to have any hope of avoiding manipulation is to study the ways your brain fails. It’s how your brain functions, using quick-and-dirty techniques to make choices because you don’t have anywhere near the time or information to really ponder deeply. These are successful tools, evolved over millions of years, and it’s only in the last few decades that people turned exploiting it into an art and a science.