> [...] selling ads isn't evil and they have no intention or incentive to violate anyone's privacy
Depends on your perspective. Take eating meat. A butcher doesn't think that selling meat is evil, but I'd bet that cows would.
I've done work in advertising, but it's now on the list of things I won't work on. The basic purpose of almost all advertising is to manipulate people into buying stuff. I've come to see that manipulation as immoral. I think it's also an enormous waste: so many bright, creative people putting their lives into something that produces no net systemic benefit. Advertising is an arms race between companies, and we could re-purpose circa $1 trillion annually if we declared an armistice.
Your definition of net systemic advertising is rather different to mine. There are multiple products I wouldn't know about, and wouldn't have bought, without advertising. Yes, those adverts can be misleading, but they also give me the information I need to make purchasing choices.
You mean net systemic value? You've only described a gross local value, and you haven't fully examined your contrafactual.
For net systemic value to be better than a world without advertising, you would have to count not just your personal positives and nothing else but individual positives and negatives both in the actual world and in the contrafactual.
For example, a lot of people have died from cancer caused by tobacco advertising, and things like the car accidents and liver failures that result from alcohol advertising. That's the actual negative side. You've assumed that in the contrafactual you just never would have heard about those products. But people hear about products all the time without advertising, so that's unproven. Perhaps in a world without ads we'd have more things like Consumer Reports and The Wirecutter, yielding better-informed decisions.
You also ignore the not-as-good products you're using because you never heard about the better ones with smaller advertising budgets. Think of all the folks using inappropriate Microsoft and Oracle products just because their bosses saw an ad. Similarly, you ignore how you've missed out on the products that don't exist because their companies were crushed via large advertising budgets. E.g., all the good beer that wasn't drunk because Budweiser out-advertised the small breweries.
And you also ignore the opportunity cost of advertising. I know a lot of smart, creative people who devote their lives to trying to shift market share from one essentially equivalent product to another. And for the most part, their work is canceled out by people from other advertising agencies. What if that money was spent on R&D, or just given back to the customers? What if those people were doing something that made the world better?
For net systemic value to be positive, the social benefits (product discovery is the only one you mention) would have to be greater than the costs. I don't think advertising actually helps, in net, with product discovery, but if it did I don't believe the value created even covers the $1 trillion or so in direct costs, let alone things like MS SQL Server and lung cancer.
Even if the benefits did cover all that (which I deny strongly) then I don't think it justifies the opportunity costs as compared with a world where people found their products through Consumer Reports and we spent the spare $1 trillion on something useful.
Depends on your perspective. Take eating meat. A butcher doesn't think that selling meat is evil, but I'd bet that cows would.
I've done work in advertising, but it's now on the list of things I won't work on. The basic purpose of almost all advertising is to manipulate people into buying stuff. I've come to see that manipulation as immoral. I think it's also an enormous waste: so many bright, creative people putting their lives into something that produces no net systemic benefit. Advertising is an arms race between companies, and we could re-purpose circa $1 trillion annually if we declared an armistice.