It doesn't do to believe too much in advertisements. We wouldn't, for example, dare to drink a pint of stout for fear we'd be left eating oysters in the freezing cold with nothing but a slip of swimsuit for protection. Advertising people always get a bit prickly when people like me try to get smart about the logical implications of their ads, insisting their campaigns are much more subtle and clever than we think.
The general idea is that the power of suggestion is a very strong one: we associate the consumption of stout with a Cinderella-like metamorphosis into the kind of glamorous being whose life is so exciting that consuming aphrodisiacs at high tide is a normal day's work.
There is no easy answer to the conundrum - advertising can be hugely irritating, patronising and downright silly, yet can also amuse, inform and undoubtedly sell. It has an additional, more interesting, function, even if it's not quite the one advertisers have in mind. As a mirror on society, it can't be beaten, reflecting back at us our aspirations, how we think about ourselves, and perhaps more importantly, what society in the larger sense, thinks the individual should aspire to. In the 1950s, the most desirable praise one could attach to a brand of tea or a sewing machine was that it would turn you into a proper little home-maker worthy of a fine pipe-smoking man called Chet. Just like that! By the 1980s, advertisers had swung back the other way, and enticed us to buy a particular brand of tights or coffee by suggesting they could simultaneously make us look good in shoulder pads, run a small multi-national company and bed the boss, which wasn't a bad deal, all things considered.
In the 1990s, the aspirations of a generation are a little more difficult to read - as far as I can see we're all meant to be home-lovin', high-powered career girls who like being single when we're not nurturing a man, a couple of sets of twins, a close-knit circle of friends and a Labrador puppy. But there is one advertising trope which has broken out like a rash in the past five years and which shows no signs of disappearing in a hurry - the "you're in control" pitch.
Pick a product, any product, and you can bet that some brand of it uses "now you're in control" as a plug. Mobile phone companies are particularly bad offenders, but insurance companies, credit card dealers, the makers of shampoo, conditioners, deodorants, kitchen towels and kitchen sinks all now come with a promise of absolute control. Stuck in a hurricane of sharp practice? Caught in a cyclone of choice? Bewildered by flyaway hair? Don't worry, Brand X will turn up like a knight on a silver charger, promising an end to consumer chaos.
Really, once you start to notice it, you realise this marketing ploy is everywhere - it may even be more popular than the "our rapto-nucleoid particles break down the dermo-cryptic layer leaving you looking less like an orange and more like a peach" school of thought.
The very prevalence of this new carrot-on-a-stick approach suggests this must be something we really want to hear - if we think that a certain toothpaste will lend us a greater measure of control, it seems a very good deal indeed. Sure, people with a brain larger than a peanut don't really think a product will ensure a greater grasp on life. It's just that this is the new secret selling-point which sucks us in just as the promise of matrimonial happiness, career independence or financial security used to.
In a way, it's hardly surprising that control has become increasingly important to us in recent years. The sheer volume of products on the shelves and on the streets has multiplied to such a degree that even people who aren't crazy for stuff, stuff and more stuff, find themselves bombarded with a bewildering collection of product, counter-product and anti-product. It's no wonder that the idea of not only keeping track of all these products but even controlling them is just too much to resist.
However, the real fear of losing control probably goes far deeper than that. Life is easier now than it ever has been - no plough-shares, mangles or steamed puddings for us, thanks very much - but instead there's a terrifying number of levels at which we must operate, huge amounts of information to assimilate, and numerous ways to fall off life's roundabout.
At this point I've gone beyond just having moments where I feel my grasp on things is slipping; I have whole days when it seems my chance of ever gaining control of anything is very remote. The traffic whizzes around me, the weather conspires to thwart me, and work remains a purely abstract concept as I muddle through a series of things that just can't be completed due to circumstances, well, beyond my control.
Yet despite seeing why being in control might be a good thing, I can't see the romance of it at all, and wouldn't thank you for being handed the reins of anything, least of all my own life. Sure, life is a little bewildering at times but being in control all the time is a more worrying concept still.
It seems bizarre that control has come to be such a deeply seductive notion when so many of life's other great seductions and vices are all about surrendering control - falling in love, getting drunk, getting high, anything with the word bungee attached. It seems likely that what image-makers are really tapping into is not a desire to be in control but a deep-seated belief in many of us that we should be in control but are not.
By luring us in with the promise of control, advertisers are pandering to our sense of inadequacy and offering us an easy way out - buy the car with precision braking, grab control of your life. As for me, I'm going to sit tight and wait until they come up with a range of products and advertisements that promise a complete lack of any control at all - "Buy our brooms and go mad as a brush in minutes". I'll buy that.