In our world, where the advertisers are already making so much noise that the only way to be heard is to pay an advertiser to shout louder than the others... ye

In our world, where the advertisers are already making so much noise that the only way to be heard is to pay an advertiser to shout louder than the others... yes, that's probably what you have to do. But in the absence of all of that noise in the first place, I think we could design something that does a much better job than ads do. As it is you have to pit your bank account against McDonald's and compete for attention, but think about how much money you could save (or spend on tastier things) if it was instead the quality of your burger that determined how widely known you ended up being. I don't have the game theoretic secret sauce that would make that happen, but I believe that it's out there and that it would be cheaper and more effective than what we're doing if we just collectively stopped tolerating ads of any kind and focused on solving the where-can-I-get-a-good-burger type problems directly.