Slightly OT: I used to think all ads were stupid, and the industry run by morons. Then at some point I thought that at least some of the ads seemed clever. At that moment, I realized that I'd shifted, and become a target demographic. The ads before weren't clueless, they just weren't aimed at me.
"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth."
No, the networks are in business to create desire. As a rule, people generally want what their peers want, so the chief goal of advertising is to create the impression that everyone wants the product. The very act of putting it in a prominent place is the first step, since everyone seeing it knows that everyone else is also seeing it.
Contrary to popular belief, the market isn't a simple system of people with inherent needs meeting those with products, but a complex web of collective psychology driven by a combination of the social network and mass media.
We need to go deeper.
It just works™
You can't say that ads don't work and also argue that most people are too mindless to ignore them!