If you were born today and somehow manage to live to retirement age you will have been exposed to over seventy million advertisements of one sort or another by age sixty-five. These mostly rude interruptions are called exposures or sometimes nowadays impressions because the implication is that they happen while you are living life and many times don’t consciously make note of them.

The conspiracy theory goes that even if you don’t decide to actively consume the message, it is imprinted on your brain all the same and this exposure waits there, like a sleeper cell, until a latent mental trigger activates it. Maybe that uninvited message turns up as a song you can’t get out of your head or a craving that you can’t get out of your stomach or maybe it surfaces as an impulse purchase that becomes impossible to explain to the wife. Holy crap! This advertising mind control is some serious shit; just look at all the silly stuff it’s already made us do.

When you were a toddler your mom started buying Froot Loops exclusively because she heard they had “eight essential vitamins and iron.” Thirty years later you’ve consumed your body weight in Loops and you’re hooked. Mom should have known something was fishy when they spelled fruit F-R-O-O-T.

You saw an ad in TV Guide offering twelve 8-tracks for a penny. Guess who just happened to a have a penny in his pocket? Yep. Well, that penny equated to a contract that roped you into buying ten more 8-tracks at $36 apiece. You just paid off the final tape last September, and to add insult to injury, since you only recognized ten of the listed titles, 8-track number eleven and twelve ended up being the soundtrack to Oliver! and Zsa Zsa Gabor Sings the Hungarian Hits.

A few years ago someone started telling men that shaving their faces was really hard and one of the main causes of angst and emotional trauma in life. Some men have grabbed a hold of this humanitarian lifeline and are now on the road back to emotional health thanks to their credit card information and razor blades delivered every other day by mail. Suicidal hipsters, now with pallets of surplus razor blades are finally finding the strength to go on. Thank god for advertising!

Instead of turning on the faucet, we now buy faucet water in plastic bottles. Because of advertising, many people believe this water comes from a natural spring because there’s a snow-capped mountain on most of the bottle labels. They envision lines of Swiss people reaching out individual plastics bottles and filling them from a waterfall in the Alps. They have no logical explanation for why this water tastes exactly like the water sourced from a backyard hose in Santa Ana.

And what else but damn-convincing advertising can explain this? People are mailing their DNA to strangers because today’s modern travelers know that the secret to happiness lives within their personal genome. Once the company gets your spit and $199 and your credit card info and your mother’s maiden name, they provide you with a certificate that enables you to avoid taking personal responsibility for anything ever again; that is, they provide scientific proof that every flaw you may have is totally genetic. It’s not your fault. What’s more, if you like, they can also give you the family tree information you need to disavow any ancestral connections you previously knew. Fuck the witness protection program, this is the fast track to assuming a new identity.

Yep, powerful mojo that advertising and many of our fellow travelers are impressionable and gullible as hell. I would suggest that some people start watching less TV otherwise, they may start answering all questions with the phrase Dilly-Dilly and have absolutely no idea why.