You see a commercial promoting a swanky new gadget and you just gotta have it. Your favourite celebrity endorses a product and you're not exactly sure what it is but you gotta get your hands on it too.

In previous time, people had a different concept of what it meant to be clean. At that time, they often didn't have running water, they didn't have flush toilets and don't have easy running water. The kind of cleanliness you can attain is limited. So, people would wash in a basin, they might use some soap that grandma had made but they didn't have an easy time of keeping their bodies or their home clean and they certainly didn't have shelves full of products designed to help them stay hygienically pure.

Sooner, people started realising that living in filth wasn't good for their health. Infectious diseases begin to go up in number particularly in large cities. Then scientific evidence started showing that microscopic organisms or germs often found in dirty homes and cities what is the cause of disease. This acceptance of the germ theory of disease was slow to accept because it depended on a belief that something you couldn't see was making you sick.

Oddly enough enthusiasm for the germ theory didn't come from the medical profession but from advertisers of products. Then came ‘Toilets’. Because of diseases like Cholera and typhoid, public health authorities realised, it was spread by faecal matter from sick people going into drinking water. Some of the early products that was sold to protect people from those germs included water filters, toilets and related innovations.

Researches shows the spread of germs through personal contact be it coughing, spitting, or sneezing. They realised that person to person contact is significant in the spread of very deadly diseases.  

Advertisers target people's insecurities often within the cultural norms of that time to sell their products claiming. For instance, mouthwash could help you with your social life and people totally bought it. Advertisers also got the eye of a public by using graphics, pictures, line drawings, catchy slogans and even jingles.

But we can't deny that advertisers help people make homes cleaner and improving public health all while making a buck. But by making money out of this fear of jumps advertisers in advertently made the public health made cities more sanitary and created cultural ships in personal hygiene that we still see