You take two leaps here that don't follow:

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.