Chen Shi is jealous of a beautiful woman she encounters almost every day. For 15 seconds, this woman twists her body under a shower, her slender legs and white skin covered in soap bubbles. She speaks in a sweet, but spoilt child's voice.

The woman is Taiwan supermodel Lin Chi-ling in a skincare TV commercial. But it's surprising how Chen, a 23-year-old online news editor and a well-informed woman, could have such feelings.

Chen, however, is not the only person to fall prey to such advertisements. A 2006 study conducted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) shows that youth across the country are the target.

These ads are meant not only to sell products, but also to make promises and create new values and lifestyles.

"The advertisers want to convince you that every woman should look like Lin," says Chen. "But how many can actually do so?"

The advertiser, however, can call its campaign a success at least in one aspect because even someone like Chen, who hates the ad, admits to having bought the product.

"One of the aims of advertising is to make us feel dissatisfied," explains Jean Kilbourne, the US author of Can't Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel.

After all, she argues: "Why would advertisers spend billions of dollars on psychological research?"

Not everyone agrees with this, though, and certainly not the advertisers. Some still think they're just responding to needs or helping clarify them.

"Most advertising is not about creating 'new' needs, but about helping choose the product closest to your needs from among several possibilities," says Rob Hughes, managing partner at advertising company MindShare in Beijing.

Kilbourne concedes that "advertising does reflect what's going on in a culture". But it "carefully selects only the values that promote consumerism".

What does that mean? Values such as a sense of community, spirituality and inner beauty, for instance, are often ignored. A lean body is not a known historical obsession among women. It's an ideal created by pop culture and advertising, she says.

The CASS study of about 5,000 TV commercials found that 83 percent of them had young women as their focus, with over 81 percent of the characters having modern-day "ideal" features.

And more than a fourth of them wore dresses that "increased their sexual appeal".

No one wants to believe they have been influenced by advertising, Kilbourne says. "(But) ads are designed to influence our unconscious. (When actually) what we are least conscious of influences us the most."

In China, people see between 700 and 2,200 ads every day, and may not always remember the products they sell, Kilbourne says. But their "hidden" messages of the ideal female body, for instance leave their mark on our mind. Women want their bodies to look like the ones in the ads to be considered beautiful, and men begin expecting the improbable forms.

The television and billboard are not the only media to beam those ads, for companies use Internet chatrooms, text messages, entertainment programs and even T-shirts to push their products.

US pop culture critic and senior editor at TelevisionChronicles.com Ed Robertson says advertisers are now integrating their products into plots of TV shows and movies.

The film Curiosity Kills Cat, for example, shows a huge camera ad at one point. On another occasion, the hero is seen opening his mailbox to check a sponsor's newspaper. Though new technological advancements allow customers to watch TV shows without seeing the commercials, ads will continue to target the youth because they are the largest group of consumers.

(China Daily February 26, 2007)