Commercial Advertisements and their Visual Langauge

It is not unknown that advertisements are customized to create needs where they do not exist. They are tailored to make viewers feel incomplete without that product. Yet (and therefore) the best adds are those that deceive consumers onto believing that these implied 'needs' are real and genuine.
After industrialization , consumerism was bound to be the result. In between these two phenomenon are the commercial advertisements that control the interaction (and traffic) between the industry and the consumer. They play the role of traffic lights and policemen (with the more corrupt ones exercising more power), who are noticed yet not scrutinized. These street signals are metaphors of ads that determine the direction and density of traffic to a certain destination (the product).
The visual language in designed to target the vulnerable points of male and female sexuality in most cases. They target "the lust of the flesh" and "the lust of the eyes" , manipulating consumers into believing that the products and services being portrayed will satisfy these "needs". The fact is 'desire' is not the same as 'need'. The products probably satisfy desires, not necessarily needs.
The challenge for ads today is to fool the consumer into believing that he is not being fooled. The ads are forced to pretend that they are revealing more than they conceal. The visual language is the vehicle of these internal dynamics,but like a vehicle it does not reveal the mechanism. Only the end product of the attractive visual ad is shown (except for those who take the trouble to find out the process).
The visual language of ads serve either as:
a) A tool to know OR
b) An excuse for ignorance
Consumers are thrown (always) into a realm (the media) where either they control the influence of the perceived visual on them of it controls them. This interaction is not always a partnership. Often it is a subtle warfare that is constantly 'on'. At this junction, I am reminded of a client who asked his web-designer to create an interface whose concept would be derived from a book titled "Art Of War" that appropriates East- Asian strategies of martial arts to business management.I realized that this book has not only succeeded in advertising itself but has managed to enter the method of ads as well.
The challenge for consumers is to find out the mechanism of control in the information systems from within, as being 'in' the media is not a matter of choice anymore.