I know I'm a cynical uni bomber type, I don't expect anyone to 100% agree or for adverts to disappear. But dwhen was the last time an advert actually informed you of a product you didn't know about and would have been interested in buying if it weren't advertised to make it so?
Most modern advertising is a less than zero sum game for the consumer.
I.e. you could have achieved the same by explaining your needs to some shop or service. Just tell them that you are a runner and want relevant ads in your mailbox. No need to tell them about the rest of your life.
You could argue that it just happens to also be to your benefit by chance, but that's certainly not where the incentives lie.
By comparison, companies like consumer reports, which instead directly sell you information to influence your behavior to your benefit are tiny. The advertising industry is nearly a trillion dollar industry -- if a large amount of that value is going to the consumer why hasn't there been massive innovation in selling to it directly to the consumer?
GP's comment about selling us shit we don't want/need is a hard pill to swallow. It's highly counterintuitive and demeaning to our sense of agency -- just like so many results in modern psychology.
But I think that view also misses the bigger picture twice. First, because while the consumer-producer relationship is positive sum and that's the whole reason it exists, pricing is not. If advertising makes it easier to connect with a product you want, then the price can be raised. We should think about how advertising makes the things we want more expensive.
But second, I think we should also think about how the relationship of advertiser to producer may not be positive sum. Producers compete with each other in a fashion that isn't positive sum, and advertisers sell to all producers. That's an arms race. I can't effectively start a business without using advertising because all my competitors use advertising. Advertising doesn't account for a trillion dollars in demand per year -- it just siphons it from producers by selling them the same arms they sell to their competitors.
But a hefty part of that value does come from selling it to the consumer, as long as he or she is interested. Advertising, and especially online advertising have both "democratized" greatly as the ad industry has grown over recent decades, and smaller business, so many of them belonging to consumers in other contexts, use this same consumer data to try benefitting their own bottom line.
This always comes up. But perhaps we should also ask the opposite question: what if we banned all ads, how would that affect overconsumption? It could theoretically be the best thing that ever happened to the planet.