Yeah, I'm pretty receptive to this POV. "Manipulative" is carrying a lot of work in this discussion though.

I'll just add one memorable example of where ads actually worked for me. I was frustrated by how thick wallets were and so I happened to Google "thin wallets," and got an ad for the "Allet", which was exactly what I was looking for, and I did end up buying it, and I still use Allets to this day. That said, I tried the same search just now and Allet didn't come up in the first page of results, so I'm not sure what to make of that, ha.