Advertising really works. It also really costs.

Joshua was watching me clean the loo earlier this week.
"Is that Harvic power plus?", he asked.
"Uh, yes sweetheart."  (I decided not to pick up on his mispronunciation of 'Harpic'.)
"I thought it was", he stated matter-of-factly.  "I saw it on the telly and I thought it was a good thing to buy".
"Why's it a good thing to buy sweety?", I asked.
"Because", (and at this point, he made a sweeping motion with his arm as though squirting toilet cleaner around the bowl) "it kills all the germs."

It's not surprising that people spend money on advertising.  It actually works.
Did you know that in the year 2000 (sorry, old stats) approximately £309 billion was spent on advertising.
Which, when you compare this with the fact that:
"It is estimated that the additional cost of achieving and maintaining universal access to basic education· for all, basic health care for all, reproductive health care for all women, adequate food for all and safe water and sanitation for all is roughly $40 billion a year."  (From UN Human Development Report '98)  Oh, and while we're on numbers, that's the same amount that we spend on a combination of ice cream in Europe and perfumes and pet food in Europe and the US (11bn, 12bn and 17bn respectively)
Oh, and some final rich-poor stats (sorry, I've been distracted from my funny story by scary stats)
"The three richest people have assets that exceed the combined GDP of the 48 least developed countries.
• The 15 richest have assets that exceed the total GDP of Sub-Saharan Africa.
• The wealth of the 32 richest people exceeds the total GDP of South Asia.
• The assets of the 84 richest exceed the GDP of China, the most populous country, with 1.2 billion inhabitants."
(Same source - http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/hdr_1998_en_chap1.pdf)
So, 84 people have more assets than the GDP of one sixth of the world.  Nice.
Sorry - this was a funny story to start with, and now you're feeling bad about the rich-poor divide.  Oh well, that's life...