Well, a constant barrage of promotional messages, playing with people's feelings, taking advantage of psychology, hurting their self-worth to hook them (buy these clothes to be like those beautiful people, fat? you need this product, buy this gadget and enter the lifestyle of the persons using it in the ad), embedded covertly in TV, movies, celebrities and openly in tv, billboards, print, webpages, video games, mobile apps, flyers, posters, and so on, is not exactly "minor".
We see hundreds of ads every day. Even if we miss each particular product placement, their aggregated core message "buy more stuff" and "your life is not perfect like the people in the ads" registers just fine.