Advertising needs to be more targeted if anything. I don't want to see a bunch of irrelevant junk - I want to see high quality products that are useful to my life.
I've personally blocked who knows how many tens of thousands of ads online over the past couple decades. Somehow I doubt my life is lacking for not buying hundreds of extra products I would have learned about from all those targeted ads.
>to manage or influence skillfully, especially in an unfair manner.
I think we can agree that advertisers influence skillfully, given that advertising firms don't typically pick their executives from a pool of unskilled labor. If I were taking your position, I would take issue with the qualifier "unfair" here. After all, what's unfair about showing a product that people are interested in? Isn't that what they want? To be shown things that are interesting? People don't often go to uninteresting movies, or sit through uninteresting lectures. Surely it saves everyone a lot of time to skip through the uninteresting products and get right to the ones that actually make sense for a person to buy.
This is where it gets interesting. Targeted ads a not simply "showing a person something they are interested in, because in order to show something to someone who is interested in it, we have to have a willful expression of that interest. When a person goes to a car dealership, they don't say "hey! It's unfair that you're showing me all these cars!" because, well, they expressed interest in cars by showing up at a car dealership and asking for a person to show them around.
Targeted ads do not take in willful signals. They take in surveillance data. They watch how a person moves and infer things about them; they assess when the right moment of low will power exists, to insert the ad at just the right moment of influence-ability. That is what is unfair about them, because it subverts the social contract around the purchase of goods and services. Instead of making one's product so good that the most number of people will buy it, they follow people around to find the time they are most vulnerable to what they're selling.
I'll repeat an idea I had a while ago, but if countries just had national networks where companies could list their products and services in a way that is highly structured and as systematically scrubbed of bias or psychological manipulation as possible, we would get the best of both worlds. Effortless and non-favoring lookup of what you want, fair comparisons between products, no favoritism to the wealthy, no FOMO or mind tricks.
I'd argue here that a business's marketing budget is going to be effectively unlimited if it's profitable, assuming they have the initial budget to kickstart it which most do. If $10 in ad spend returns $12, you can just keep pouring money into it.
Apart from that yeah you're right that the goal is better product discovery.