[tsimionescu]

> There's a fixed amount of attention and they want to drag it from wherever it would naturally be to some place you don't really want it to be.

That is exactly what ads are trying to do. It is the very essence of advertising: get your attention. This is ingrained to the extent that everyone knows "there's no such thing as bad publicity".

And it's just as much if not more 0-sum as SEO. The stated purpose of advertising is to make you spend your money on something that you otherwise wouldn't have. That's sometimes about spending your money on product A instead of A's competitors, and sometimes just to spend your money on X instead of saving/investing it.

Even worse, advertising is trying to convince you to spend irrationally: instead of doing your own cost/benefit analysis, advertising's purpose is to convince you to act out of emotion, or to outright lie about the cost and benefit of the product.