At a generic level, isn't most advertisement psychologically harmful? The goal is to convince you your life is incomplete unless you buy the thing.
We should confine advertising to a sandbox which users can visit when they feel like it. Then everybody can be happy, not just advertisers.
The sandbox could even be made so that consumers can fill in their personal information, so that advertisers can learn more about consumers without even tracking them. That would be an advantage for advertisers and also for consumers because they can be selective about the information they provide.
And of course advertisers will try to lure people into the sandbox with discounts etc, so we should punish any discrimination between consumers who do and consumers who don't visit the sandbox.
OP proposed that advertising is psychologically manipulating people into believing their lives are incomplete and asked whether that is a harm. You conflated this manipulation with built-in desires; it is not that.
By analogy, it is as though OP argued that deliberately withholding food from prisoners to cause them distress from hunger is a harm and you are countering that OP may as well describe hunger itself as harmful.
> Most people don’t subscribe to the Buddhist point of view, though.
Buddhism does not consider desires an inherently harmful. Being captured by desires and constantly craving can be, but that's not the same as the mere existence of desires that can arise.
Perhaps you’re reading more into the original comment than I am, but what I took exception with was the notion that the type of emotions aroused by most ads are harmful. I don’t think it’s comparable with withholding food, in either the level of control or the magnitude.