I think it's quite necessary to differentiate two different values that advertising delivers. Advertising allows products to overcome obscurity so that consume

I think it's quite necessary to differentiate two different values that advertising delivers. Advertising allows products to overcome obscurity so that consumers are made aware of the product and Advertising allows products to stimulate demand in the market. The first kind of advertising is the one we can pretty much all get behind - if you offer a service that's better than a competitor advertising can allow you to overcome the natural knowledge and networking advantages that your competitors might be skating by on to keep their sub-par product selling. This kind of advertising allows goliaths to be thrown down by davids and can help improve folks quality of life by minimizing the amount they're spending on unnecessarily inefficient products. This kind of advertising has been around forever and constituted the vast majority of advertising up until very recently - once a brand was well established they'd start slashing advertising since their reach was already pretty effectively covering the market space. The second kind of advertising is to drive up demand in consumers that already know who you are - into this bucket falls every ford advertisement since about 1940 and every Coke ad since the 60s - these products are already completely known by consumers. CocaCola doesn't run advertisements because they're afraid you've never heard of their product, it runs advertisements to drive up demand - and the advertisements of competitors products are usually symbiotic - whether Coke or Pepsi sponsored the ad you just saw doesn't generally matter, you're going to end up buying a soda and in a significant number of places you can purchase one there is a local monopoly anyways - rare is the restaurant where you can get a Coke and your date can get a Pepsi. These advertisements intend to modify your preferences and create demand - rather than insuring that their product is known as one of the options to fulfill an existing demand... if you believe Coke advertisers don't believe everyone on earth is aware of their product then I've got a bridge to sell you. The second kind of advertising makes up nearly all of modern advertising, it is a parasitic practice that reduces the efficacy of the free market (by levying a cost on attention in exchange for no added information delivered to the consumer). It is also responsible for the aggressive increase in obnoxiousness of advertising - since you're not trying to simply inform a consumer but you're actively competing with other advertisers for the limited amount of manufactured demand that each consumer can afford. In my eye this second form of advertising is utterly without value and if we need to ditch the first form to safely escape the second form its still absolutely worth it.