But you still do. And you are susceptible to advertising signaling.
You buy toilet paper, shampoo and soap (I hope), laundry detergent, gas, coffee (presumably), personal ailment products and so forth. There is no way anyone could possibly research every category products they buy. So you will use what information you have available to you...and that is probably the memory of certain brands spending a dump truck's worth of money on advertising.
I honestly don't understand the confidence with which people claim this is universally true for absolutely everyone. I have no doubt that many or most people fall back on brand recognition, but it's really not that hard to avoid. To be clear, I don't doubt that brand awareness is driven largely by advertising, but no one has ever made a good case to me for why that necessarily affects purchase.
When I buy a commodity item (soap, tp. etc), I usually buy the cheapest one that I haven't already found to be lacking (or if I hit upon a particular product that I found works well for me, I continue buying that). When I buy a big ticket item, it's almost by definition worth spending an hour doing research on, and for expensive items there are almost always ample reviews and articles representing both sides[1].
[1] I'm aware that ethics breaches like undisclosed payola have the ability to corrupt this line of investigation but it doesn't have to do with susceptibility to advertising signaling.
Studies have demonstrated it time and time again -- if you think you're unaffected, well, maybe you're less affected by most, or maybe you're engaging in wishful thinking.
Advertising does not always have the desired effect. I generally avoid commercial content - whether it be printed advertisements, sponsored content or otherwise - but it is nearly impossible to avoid being exposed to some commercial content, whether I like it or not. Those advertisers which, through sheer tenaciousness or downright trickery manage to make their way into my consciousness might not like what their presence there does: it actively lowers my perception of their products as viable choices. To me, advertising is like mould on a piece of bread, like slimy threads in a bottle of beer, like a wriggling meal worm in a bag of flour. It does many things, but it does not make me want to buy the related product. I probably conditioned myself to behave like this due to my dislike of the dishonesty in advertising, but this is less relevant. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one out there who reacts like this. Mentally connecting a brand or product to a piece of advertising just makes me think it is of low(er) quality, over-priced, designed to fail or otherwise deficient as the manufacturer needed to whittle down on production costs to pay for said advertising. It might not be true, but to me it feels like it is.
I'm not saying I'm not affected by ads. I'm saying there's no motivation for me to turn off ad blockers; I'm doing fine.
That creeped out feeling is your brain letting you know about an information asymmetry -- someone knows more about you than you know about them. When you feel creeped out in a market setting, it's a warning that you're likely to get a bad deal.
Response to some earlier comments on the article:
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/business/arguments-for-targeted-adver...