Ads can sell ideas

Ads can sell ideas and reactions as well as products. The Marists were not impressed with all the self-help books around in 1980, especially those that promoted selfishness, and so took out a full-page ad in Time to protest-and to do a little recruiting. "Selfishness is not new; Jesus found it everywhere," starts out the copy. ''What is new is the attempt to make it respectable, to celebrate it as a virtue, to package and sell it as a new-found cure-all.'The Marists, according to this ad, follow "an older Book which is always new, which is never a fad."