Because brands are purposely creating ads that customers can't discern. It's a cat/mouse thing just like IT security - sec people find a new way to secure their

Because brands are purposely creating ads that customers can't discern. It's a cat/mouse thing just like IT security - sec people find a new way to secure their tech, hackers find a way around it, sec patch that, hackers find a new exploit etc. With ads, brands find a new strategy to disguise ads, consumers get used to it and learn to recognize them/be aware of them, brands find a new strategy. The lease discerning X percentage of people will always be unaware of the more sophisticated ads, the most discerning X percentage will always be aware. I think it's bad for human psychology, almost by definition, to have all these corporations/entities bombarding your senses with content designed to influence you in a specific way that is beneficial to them / not beneficial to the people. Without regulation/disincentives they corporations will be driven by their profit motive to use any means to get you to by their products and the consequences are horrible for the population, especially when it's so many thousands of companies all fighting for pieces of your psyche with no regard to it's wellbeing. I also really don't regulation in concept, and in practice it's often at largely ineffective(not always though / it's not INHERENTLY that way). This is one of many problems with capitalism / free market that are often waved away by pointing out the problems with the alternatives to capitalism, which are often also fair criticisms. It's an extremely hard problem, finding a system that minimizes the consequences to catastrophic levels(let alone the difficulties of implementing a new system). Sacrifice of wellbeing in some ways might just be a necessary tradeoff for any system that leads to "progress" - a possibility I've considered but can't really grasp yet(would love anyones input on this). I know I've gotten a bit off topic but I think advertising and it's consequences are a very clear example of this kind of tradeoff which makes it a useful topic for discussing this kind of thing. In theory it's possible to imagine a system that allows for progress but in reality any non-free market system requires concentrated power somewhere to enforce regulations which seems gives the possibility of corruption, and it seems the possibility of corruption at scale always leads to corruption