[alansammarone]

This is... an understatement. I would agree advertising is a useful signal, but I would say that not only can you not trust advertising, you should put negative weight on advertising - i.e. whenever you see an ad, that means the company is putting some amount of money into trying to convince you by means other than an honest comparison/spec table, and therefore is likely to have an inferior product. So personally, I generally avoid any companies/people whose presentations contains no information about the objective characteristics of their work.

[tayo42]

You have to advertise to some degree otherwise no one will even know what your product is

[alansammarone]

Id like to believe people have enough agency to do a google search to at least figure out their options, but granted, I might be wrong about that.

Edit: I do agree you should have a google-findable website which lists the objective characteristics of your product. If you call that advertising (I call it a "release", and I reserve the word "ad" for anything that has emotional appeal and caters to the indifferent/uninformed), then I agree.

[tayo42]

Hoping people stumble on to page 3 of Google to find your thing isn't sustainable so you need some kind of advertising.

You need someway to get whatever your selling into a place where people buy things