Ask HN: Anyone else feel people here are a bit too harsh on advertising?

Or marketing in general? Because from what I've seen it, it seems like a decent chunk of Hacker News users think marketing is evil incarnate, some unethical manipulation tactic that's outright damaging to society. For example, in the comments here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18377296 Or here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18334263 But I'm not sure I agree with this. For one thing, not all (or to be honest, even most) marketing or advertising is necessarily dishonest, sometimes it's just mentioning what exists and showing how it works. Quite a lot of media trailers are that way really. Virtually every major Nintendo Switch game trailer is about as straight forward as you can get. I also think people forget exactly how much comes under advertising in general. A company's website is a marketing arm for them. The packaging of the product is. Obviously any trailers or presentations they hold (looks at Apple) are. Is that a bad thing? Not sure I'd say Apple having a flashier website is a negative for society. I also feel a lot of people put too much stock in people magically choosing some materially 'best' option. Like if ads were gone, word of mouth would somehow mean only the best products and services won. I'm not sure that'd be the case to be honest. People are creatures of habit, and a lot of the time, they'll stick to a product or brand simply for familiarity rather than because it's the best option at that time. It's why quite a few big chains have an audience at all. Without advertising or marketing, I suspect the situation wouldn't change much from how it is now. Those with more name recognition get the lion's share of the market, and the rest fight for scraps. But what do you think?