I've thought this for years. The only case I can really think of where a quality product would need to be advertised would be in a market that has an established go-to brand, to the point where people won't even consider an alternative, and need to be informed that one exists. But at the same time, in those markets, that brand has so much advertising money that they can afford to simply snuff out any emerging competition. So there's absolutely no case in which advertising is anything but a means of exploiting people and entrenching monopolies. Nobody learns anything valuable from a Coke ad, but it stops you from thinking about alternative soda brands when you go to the store, which gives Coke more money to buy more ads to get you to buy more Coke. And that's not even mentioning all the wasted time and money that goes into the constant development of anti-adblock technology (see the recent YouTube war on adblock). Think what we could do with that money if we used it for something interesting or helpful, instead of making sure people see yet another ad for fuarrrking Walmart, as if they're not going to skip it the second they can anyway.