The only difference I see is that the government has your best interest in mind (ostensibly, of course, don't mistake me for thinking it really does). Advertisers do not.
I'm much less free to choose whether I comply with the government, whose power to modify behavior is ultimately derived from the threat of men with guns coming to lock me in a concrete cell.
Advertising is memetic pollution but I'll still take it any day, every time over government compulsion; the equivocation of the two is ludicrous.
Advertising, however, survives only because it finds the people interested in the products. When the government does it, it survives on people that pay for it at the risk of going to jail. The standard of what government can do is infinitely higher, because it can do something against everyone and do it forever.