What advertising does, and how it does it, has little to do with the movement of specific goods. Like religion, which has little to do with the actual delivery of salvation in the next world but everything to do with the ordering of life in this one, commercial speech has little to do with material objects per se but everything to do with how we perceive them.

—James B. Twitchell, Adcult: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture