Advertising has a real social usefulness sure - when a new company or product needs to break into an existing market, good advertising and marketing are the onl

Advertising has a real social usefulness sure - when a new company or product needs to break into an existing market, good advertising and marketing are the only way it will succeed against the current, possibly inferior products. That said, I think a lot of advertising is deception - you are trying to make the customer believe things that are useful to you, in spite of what they have seen. For instance, before the MS Surface launched, they spent a lot of money on product placement. In the TV series Dallas, when ever any science or engineering is done, it is done on a Surface, pre-released to the film crew. It does not matter if the Surface is really a good platform for doing science. It matters that the customer thinks 'innovation, science, business, profit, Surface'. What is true does not matter. The surface pro is actually a cool thing, and I hear students love them. Perhaps the above deception will help them succeed - deception is not necessarily evil, if it helps move people to a place where they can make a better decision. Generally, if a user is looking for your service (Payday Loan), then they are already intending to buy that product, and adwords bids or SEO decide which competitors they will choose between. This is the opposite to a comparison site that genuinely helps a user find the best product for them (and insurance friends tell me comparison sites have decimated profit in that industry). But more dangerously, SEO and adwords can make a user searching for 'moonlighting jobs' or 'how to get out of debt' see Payday Loans as an option, where the highest quality advice would actually be to negotiate with their bank, and maybe get a bigger overdraft. Obviously, the evil in the above example is Payday Loans, and not advertising. But the case I make, for the evil of google, is that the most money is made (advertising has the greatest effect) when it causes people to take bad decisions. Google make money most from helping make people make bad decisions.