If you buy a vacuum sweeper because the advertising claims it will make cleaning easy and be the best thing that ever happened to you, you deserve to be disappointed. You also deserve to get your money back.

Advertising in America has become not a matter of providing the information, which you need, or about exposure, but it has become who can tell the biggest lies and make people believe them. Who is responsible for this phenomenon? Us. We buy into the lies and buy their products, and accept that they lied to us and buy more. If lies didn't work, they wouldn't use them; ask any politician.

The trick is to disguise the lie, and corporations spend billions to do just that. Is it a lie if the product looks a little better in the ad than in real life? Is it a lie when the guy gets the girl because he wore the after-shave lotion? It's certainly deceptive, but no one ever takes the lotion back and says, "I didn't get mobbed by pretty girls." Maybe if they did, the companies wouldn't use that approach anymore. As long as it works, they will continue to use it, and we will continue to buy their products.

The reason is that we want to be fooled into believing. A wise person recently wrote on helium, "People want to believe, not think." That one bit of wisdom answered many questions I had asked myself over the years. We buy into deceptive advertising because we want to believe, not think. We are trained to then be disillusioned and accept the reality, after parting with our hard-earned money, too late, but for that brief moment, we got to believe, and that was worth it to us, then.

We live in a society where we depend on an economy that is fueled by advertising, much of it is deceptive, and we like it and we complain about it, both. How important to us is deceptive advertising? It is our very existence, because we want to believe we can get the girl.

Learn more about this author, Will Kester.
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