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Trade shows and catalogs are forms of advertising.

Also, regarding "pull not push", people sometimes don't know there is a solution to their "problem" (where "problem" might not be a real problem, per se, but maybe simply not even knowing that a given option exists).

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You can define anything as advertising if you try hard enough. That's not very helpful for trying to strike a balance, though.

Of the ads I see, if we exclude the drug ads that really should not be allowed, I'd say that an extremely small fraction are telling me about solutions I didn't already know existed. The "useful" case should not be so rare.

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