The difference between the two is one I can choose to avoid, the other is affecting who chooses my rights and laws with less focus on the people affected by those decisions and more on the affect to those funding their campaigns.
Put differently, corporate political advertising amounts to about 0.5% of advertising in the US. That tells you a lot about how unimportant it is to companies’ bottom lines. It’s basic arithmetic. These political decisions are worth hundreds of billions of dollars per year. If corporations invest only a billion influencing them, that means the influence is very attenuated: it only affects votes at the margins.
There are ample reasons to be concerned about the effect of money on the American political system. Personally I am more focused on regulatory capture through lobbying than elections per se. In the current system it looks to me as if billionaires win regardless of who's in office.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Huffington [1] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/05/the-koch-brother...