Devil's advocate / on the other hand: there's so much potential lost with all the effort going into producing products that make the world better, but which fall flat due to a lack of or poor advertising.
We can keep flipping this as long as we want. At the end of the day, it sucks that companies get a bigger (short-term) reward by dumping more into advertising and marketing than into the product itself.
I’m curious about all these world changing wonder products that just aren’t popular because a marketing agency wasn’t involved in manipulating... I mean educating the public.
It's like how advertisers often claim "the internet wouldn't exist without advertising".
What they really mean is all the sites (composing the majority of the internet now it seems) which have such little or negative instrinsic value that they must rely on click baiting, psychological manipulation, and selling out to advertisers would die out -- leaving only those sites which provide enough value that people care to pay for themselves, like it used to be in the "good old days"
Edit: This regards all forms of product promotion, not just paid ads.