Ads are a very bad hack to the problem of getting people to spread news of a product through word-of-mouth. Things like the AeroPress get lots of sales and I've

Ads are a very bad hack to the problem of getting people to spread news of a product through word-of-mouth. Things like the AeroPress get lots of sales and I've only seen them sitting on a shelf in a coffee shop, being talked about online, etc. The ads I see for New Relic, PagerDuty, PyCharm, etc. are relevant to me but they are not actionable. They would be relevant and actionable if I am consciously looking for these products as part of a report that will kick-start the procurement process. All the books I've bought in the last year were based on recommendations from blogs and podcasts. We're at peak ads on the internet.