ABSTRACT
Williams called advertising a magic system with inordinate powers to persuade by tapping into unconscious desires, promising the good life and all the things that go with it. Rossi notes that advertising imagery plays a definite role in the sexualization of urban space and that it is connected with soft-porn representations because of its visual patterning and fragmenting of the body by cropping and foregrounding the culturally eroticized parts of it. Cortese argues that successful advertising is able to manifest rich, intimate, and astute cultural and sub-cultural messages and representations as well as universal biological desires. In the ongoing debates about sexualisation, children have been the centre of concern and, as advertising is such a public format, there is particular interest in how children's healthy development might be at risk from casual or inadvertent exposure to sexual representations of adults in advertising, or from sexualised representations of children themselves.
