[imtringued]

>At no time in the economic... chain?... of events that is advertising is anything actually created, yet vast sums of money, and thus allocation of resources, is put here. It seems INSANELY wasteful.

You're forgetting something, companies start off completely unknown. How did they reach the point where the market has been fully saturated and the only real way to gain more customers is to take them from someone else? Oh right, it's because advertising increased the grow rate of your company to the point where there is barely any growth left.

Let's manufacture a completely artificial scenario to illustrate my point:

Person A: So, you're telling me you spent $5 billion on advertising and all you have to show for it is a 5% higher market share than your biggest competitor?

Founder: Yes, we used the advertising budget to grow our market share from less than 1% to 40%. Our next biggest competitor has a 35% market share.

[agalunar]

Right, but there's a difference between connecting a business to a customer who wants the product (which is good!) and influencing the wants and needs of the customer, particularly against the long-term interests of the customer (which is bad).

[I think it's impossible to try and succeed at connecting people with businesses without somewhat influencing their wants and needs, but ideally we limit that.]

Modern ad tech is problematic because it has little regard for people's long-term interest and demonstrably affects people's wants, particularly in the context of searching and automatically-curated feeds: since the internet is so absurdly vast and searches/feeds are the windows to the world, you can partially control the reality in which users live.