maybe this is true for you personally, but I don't think it holds in general. most of the time ads are completely useless (and I personally run ad blockers on every device I control) but every once in a while I see an ad for something useful I just wasn't aware of.
for example, I recently saw an ad for an electric hot plate that can keep a mug of coffee warm indefinitely. at first I thought it looked like a piece of trash, but then I thought what the hell, it's $10 and my coffee often gets cold before I finish drinking it. it turns out that piece of trash keeps coffee at pretty much the ideal temperature for drinking. I have gotten well over $10 worth of enjoyment from the thing and I would never have thought to purchase it if I hadn't seen the ad.
In fact, the vast majority of the ads I see I couldn’t tell a story about at all, because I see hundreds or even thousands of ads each day and they’re so fleeting.
But the effects of seeing so many ads isn’t fleeting. Whether the deliberate manipulation of my attention is successful at influencing my behavior to increase the advertiser’s revenue is irrelevant, because my attention being manipulated either way, and relentlessly so, by numerous actors who are competing with each other for space in mind, using tools and techniques so sophisticated as to be heretofore unimaginable... and this results in much less space in mind being left for... me!
This is the problem with which I take issue.
beautifully said