For example, the sixty-times-a-second flicker of the television screen may have a more powerful impact on the circuitry of the brain than the pictures those flickers create. In another sense, the context of the story — how people relate to one another in a story line — may offer more leverage than the plot. Environments are invisible, McLuhan suggested, but highly influential. This is especially true in television commercials, those thirty-second bullets of imagery and fact. The essential job of these commercials is to give us information about a product. They do this by placing the product in an environment, a context, usually a thirty-second dramatic situation known as a "slice of life."

When Ford advertises an F-150 pickup on television, we get some of the information we need to make a purchasing decision. We get information about safety features, or the size of the engine, new options or increased torque off the line. But the company delivers this information in a story that conveys subtle yet powerful information of another sort. We learn about the rugged individuals who drive these vehicles, how they feel behind the wheel or the way they interact with the girl at their side. Actually, these ads rarely show us a man taking a woman for a ride; instead, the rugged drivers are usually heading down that bumpy back road of life alone or with another man. The real information here is that this truck can help men get away from women.

Advertising spreads emotional information, telling us how to relate to one another, creating subtle models for behaviors that cannot be ignored. Sometimes the messages perpetuate old dysfunctional modes of behavior, as in the case of the truck commercial. But often product advertising can give us the leverage we need to promote healthy attitudes. When they are positive, advertising slice-of-life background stories can do a better job of changing our values and behaviors than any direct advertising message ever could.

We see positive values in commercials all the time, especially in subversive images of warm, healthy relationships (husband kissing wife, father and son fishing or going for a pizza, mother having a heart-to-heart with daughter), clean homes, pride in work and family, strangers being polite to one another, simple everyday acknowledgments, glances, touches. We see more than we remember, yet kindness is an underlying message in many commercials selling telephone services, hamburgers, running shoes, insurance and cars.

Over time, commercials even give us back a picture of ourselves as a people. When African Americans lobbied for a higher profile in television commercials, it wasn't because they wanted the jobs; it was because they wanted an accurate representation of American society. Now America is increasingly an Asian and Hispanic society. But for many of us this new reality will be reflected back in advertising long before we acknowledge it personally or experience it directly.

Advertising can integrate all sorts of behaviors into our reality — from not smoking to eating better to practicing responsible sex, even to smiling and being nice. Advertising can be a wonderful homogenizer of American life, and hidden in its subtle contextual background images may be the most powerful stimuli for social change.

These stimuli are not, as is maintained by advertising's critics, invisible to viewers who are frustrated by their own reality and numb to staged events. On the contrary, these slice-of-life situations are extremely powerful because they are subversive, and being subversive they meet with very little resistance.

The Saturn story is a case in point. In 1993 General Motors introduced an entirely new passenger car, the Saturn. To build it, they created a new company in Spring Hill, Tennessee, redesigned the production line and redefined the relationship between management and labor. The new company selected a new advertising agency founded by an old hat at warm and emotive advertising, Hal Riney. Riney's company, created a new form of old-fashioned advertising to market the car. They decided that rather than sell the car, they would sell a relationship — between potential customers and people who worked for the company that made the car.

The Saturn advertising talked about Spring Hill, Tennessee, the people who lived there and the people who made Saturns. General Motors did not just want to sell a car; it wanted people to feel good about those who made the car. In fact, one of it's biggest marketing promotions was not an advertising campaign, but a picnic. Saturn invited 70,000 of its closest friends, mostly people who had bought or made Saturns, to a "homecoming" picnic in Spring Hill.

Saturn's commercials are known as the soft sell, something that conventional wisdom holds advertising can no longer afford to do. The media is too expensive, it is said. "Sell product" is what companies are told to do, and sell hard. But increasingly, it seems product companies would rather develop a relationship. This way they can sell lots of different products over time; which ends up working well for everyone. Because of these commercials about people, we learn it is okay to like our job be civil and responsible and take pride in what we do. For every beer or truck commercial that sells machismo, or clothing ad that sells sex, there are three or four advertisements that sell a healthier aspect of the material world.

Eat Right became a national anthem of the mainstream in the 1970's. This was not the result of a public service campaign; it was the result of a mood picked up by marketers and magnified many times, not only in commercials to move low-fat products, but through story lines in other commercials. Families picnicking in front of their new cars were suddenly having fruit and bottled water instead of hot dogs and soft drinks. Commercials for life insurance companies began to portray seniors jogging instead of hobbling. Cosmetic advertisers suggested the impact of a healthy diet in their ads for healthy skin. Product companies created this health revolution because they had an incentive to do so: increased sales. As a result, we have rearranged the food pyramid in classrooms, fitness rivals wealth for status, and life expectancy for Americans is at a record seventy-six years.

Insurance companies, telephone companies, fast-food chains, and shoe makers are regularly presenting us with models of families and people who care. Nike has built a phenomenal success worldwide on its ability to promote a culture of healthy activity in pursuit of excellence on the playing field.

One recent Nike commercial confronted teen pregnancy directly. The thirty-second spot was about women and sports. "Let me play sports," a number of women young and old tell us on screen, after which one teen says, "Maybe I won't get pregnant." Teens get the message. It's not a scolding from the health department; it's a by-the-way memo from a neutral source they can trust.

This kind of advertising has an effect. If violence on television generates violence in life, then kindness, professionalism, mutual support and healthy fun, presented in commercials must also be making an impact. They have certainly sold a lot of cars, shoes and insurance.

Our best leverage for change is not through "counter" advertising and social marketing advertising campaigns, but through understanding the real power of product advertising, and making product advertising our partners for social change.