The function of Adverts
Most people would probity agree that many individual consumer adverts function on the level of the daydream. By picturing quite unusually happy and glamorous people whose success in either career or sexual terms, or both, is obvious, adverts construct an imaginary world in which the reader is able to make come true those desires which remain unsatisfied in his or her everyday life.
An advert for a science fiction magazine is unusually explicit about this. In addition to the primary use value of the magazine, the reader is promised access to a wonderful universe through the product-access to other mysterious and tantalizing worlds and epochs, the realms of the imagination’. When studying advertising, it is therefore unreasonable to expect readers to decipher adverts as factual statements about reality. Most adverts are just too meager in informative content and too rich in emotional suggestive detail to be read literally. If people read them literally, they would soon be forced to realize their error when the glamorous promises held out by the adverts didn’t materialize.
The average consumer is not surprised that his purchase of the commodity does not redeem the promise of the advertisement, for this is what he is used to in life: the individual’s pursuit of happiness and success is usually in vain. But the fantasy is his to keep; in his dream world he enjoys a "future endlessly deferred".
The Estivalia advert company is quite explicit about the fact that advertising shows us not reality, but a fantasy; it does so by openly admitting the daydream but in a way which insists on the existence of a bridge linking daydream to reality-Estivalia, which is "for daydream believers", those who refuse to give up trying to make the hazy ideal of natural beauty and harmony come true.
If adverts function on the daydream level, it clearly becomes inadequate to merely condemn advertising for channeling readers’ attention and desires towards unrealistic, paradisiacal(天堂似的)nowhere land. Advertising certainly does that, but in order for people to find it relevant, the Utopia(乌托邦)visualized in adverts must be linked to our surrounding reality by a causal connection. What is this passage mainly concerned with