I learned to distrust ads from an early age. Back in those days cover art and ads for games often had art drawn by artists in physical media, or photographs, w

I learned to distrust ads from an early age. Back in those days cover art and ads for games often had art drawn by artists in physical media, or photographs, which the 8-bit games of the day never had a snowball's chance in hell of living up to. The blurbs in ads could never really tell you whether the gameplay was any good. And, most of all, ads almost always lied. I learned that marketers and advertisers would say anything to make a sale, and that it was best to just ignore them. As a result, I never ever bought anything based on an ad... however, an ad might make me aware that something existed and entice me to investigate further. Then I'd read reviews, which too often were almost as bad as the ads, especially in the popular gaming/software magazines which preferred to write puff pieces about everything they reviewed... probably to stay on the good side of advertisers and to keep getting sent free products to review. It was rare to find honest reviews, and even then it was hard to ultimately know whether the product was actually any good until you tried it yourself, and did so for an extended period of time. I've wasted so much money on products which seemed to be good at first but ultimately turned out to be trash or not what I actually wanted/needed. Advertising rarely makes any of this any better. Usually it makes it worse.