[zeruch]

"Without advertising, the world would be filled with large companies with no incentive to innovate because it would be impossible to discover their competitors."

There is nothing in that sentence that makes sense historically, and certainly doesn't now. Larger firms can leverage advertising usually better than small players just on budget terms, so it isn't just advertising itself, but how its deployed.

Adtech favors larger players that are platforms (e.g. Doubleclick) and just scrapes marketing dollars from everyone it can, and then benefits the platform itself if its product family has competing products (Google, Amazon, etc)

Advertising doesn't provide any fairness in a playing field. It's simply a parallel arena of competition with a more opaque set of operating rules.