One of the most authoritative speaking to us today is, of course, the voice of the adverti

sers. Its strident clamor dominates our lives. It shouts at us from the television screen and the radio loudspeakers; waves to us from every page of the newspaper; plucks at our sleeves on the escalator; signals to us from the roadside billboards all day and flashes messages to us in coloured lights all night. It has forced on us a whole new conception of the successful man as a man no less than 20% of whose mail consists of announcements of giant carpet sales.

Advertising has been among England's biggest growth industries since the war, in terms of the ratio of money earnings to demonstrable achievement. Why all this fantastic expenditure？

Perhaps the answer is that advertising saves the manufacturers from having to think about the customer. At the stage of designing and developing a product, there is quite enough to think about without worrying over whether anybody will want to buy it. The designer is busy enough without adding customer appeal to all his other problems of man-hours and machine tolerances and stress factors. So they just go a head and make the thing and leave it to the advertiser to find eleven ways of making it appeal to purchasers after they have finished it, by pretending that it confers status, or attracts love, or signifies manliness. If the advertising agency can do this authoritatively enough, the manufacturer is in clover.

Other manufacturers find advertising saves them changing their product. And manufacturers have change. The ideal product is one which goes on unchanged for ever. If, therefore, for one reason or another, some alteration seems called for—how much better to change the image, the packet or the pitch made by the product, rather than go to all the inconvenience of changing the product itself.

The advertising man has to combine the qualities of the three most authoritative professions: Church, Bar, and Medicine. The great skill required of our priests, most highly developed in missionaries but present, indeed mandatory, in all, is the skill of getting people to believe in and contribute money to something which can never be logically proved. At the Bar, an essential ability is that of presenting the most persuasive case you can to a jury of ordinary people, with emotional appeals masquerading as logical exposition; a case you do not necessarily have to believe in yourself, just one you have studiously avoided discovering to be false. As for Medicine, any doctor will confirm that a large part of his job is not clinical treatment but faith healing. His apparently scientific approach enables his patients to believe that he knows exactly what is wrong with them and exactly what they need to put them right, just as advertising does—"Run down？ You need..." "No one will dance with you？ A dab-win make you popular."

Advertising men use statistics rather like a drank uses a lamp-post—for support rather than illumination. They will dress anyone up in a white coat to appear like an unimpeachable authority or, failing that, they will even be happy with the announcement, "As used by 90% of the actors who play doctors on television." Their engaging quality is that they enjoy having their latest roses uncovered almost as much as anyone else.

According to the passage, modem advertising is "authoritative" because of the way it ______.

A．influences our image of the kind of person we ought to be like

B．interferes with the privacy of home life

C．continually forces us into buying things

D．distracts us no matter where we travel