It wasn&#x27;t my intention to conflate, but I do consider advertising based on emotional appeal as harmful to society. I have no issues with content-based advertising, but that&#x27;s not the norm in my experience.<p>I know that may very well be because of selection bias, in that the less egregious forms of advertising don&#x27;t register with me (oh the ironing). For example, I actively search for reviews when buying new hardware. But the sad state of affairs is that it&#x27;s very hard to find quality information between all the content-free fluff even though both are produced in the name of &quot;advertising&quot;.<p>I disagree with your latter assertion though, that &quot;consumption is the economy&quot;. To me, that&#x27;s like saying &quot;TV is society&quot; or &quot;the president is politics&quot;. The economy is much bigger than consumption, and I did not suggest that less advertising would lead to less consumption. At least that&#x27;s what I meant with zero-sum game: it would just lead to different consumption.