People used to go to great efforts to show up to a World's Fair, which is basically all advertising. Same with entertainment or tech expos or keynotes or whatnot.
I think we've kind of binned advertising into this category of "objectively bad manipulation that ideally stops existing." Probably because there is just SO MUCH JUNK ADVERTISING these days. But I think there's legitimate, win-win occasions for advertising where you get to learn about new stuff and be entertained.
I would agree if everyone could just chill and present honest ads. Instead we have Google comparing their hardware against third-world manufacturers, Apple benchmarking their Macbooks against 4-year-old machines and Microsoft claiming performance improvements over Windows 8.
Nobody can tell an honest narrative anymore. It's just different flavors of hustling for different people, who think their taste in advertising is exclusive or developed.
Movie and videogame trailers are advertising, people still look forward to it. CES, E3, and other various industry events are advertising, and people (or their employers) even pay money to attend.
It is less about it being advertising, and more about the medium/how it is done. Those things I listed above are usually high-budget and high-effort. Regular TV ads are the lowest common denominator "bang-per-buck" type of advertising, and no one typically likes those.
Growing up I would always go to my friends house for the superbowl even though I did not care for the sport at all. The ads were always the most entertaining part for me as a kid. Then as I got older, the ads would be talked about at work that week, if you didn't watch them, you couldn't really participate. Of course now we can just stream the top 5, but no one really talks about them irl anymore.
I think we've kind of binned advertising into this category of "objectively bad manipulation that ideally stops existing." Probably because there is just SO MUCH JUNK ADVERTISING these days. But I think there's legitimate, win-win occasions for advertising where you get to learn about new stuff and be entertained.