But is the production and consumption of the audience commodity for advertisers a "productive" activity in Marxian terms? Baran and Sweezy are contradictory in answering this question. They tell us that advertising expenses "...since they are manifestly unrelated to necessary costs of production--however broadly defined--(they) can only be counted as part of aggregate surplus." [...]

Just as advertising [...] do promote and increase sales, and thus act as indispensable props to the level of income and employment [...] The prodigious volume of resources absorbed in all these activities does in fact constitute necessary cost of capitalist production. What should be crystal clear is that an economic system in which such costs are socially necessary has long ceased to be a socially necessry system.