Sadly, what you say is only a small aspect of Advertising, or should I say, marketing? The major share of it is manipulative and geared towards creating a need or preferences towards a particular product.

My argument is that, we as a society, should grew some form of resistance against such manipulations. Why? Because when a society responds to manipulation and marketing much better than the actual quality of the product, where is the incentive for the companies to improve the quality of the actual product? Hence all the efforts that should ideally go towards the creation of a better product goes into more aggressive marketing.

One can already see this happening with the blockbuster movies. Big studios start hyping up big releases as early as 2 years and continue to maintain the hype by releasing trailer and trailers of trailers, articles about how the director is a master of the craft and how the movie is going to be insane. But when you see the movie, it will be often mediocre. But the movie will be a hit regardless.

Another example. When you can influence doctors and can make then write prescriptions of your companies drug, does it make sense to spend more money improving the drug or spend a fraction of that amount, increasing marketing towards the doctors?

So I think if we grow more susceptible to such manipulations, the quality of things will continue to go down..