[Bartweiss]

Your opt-in point is a powerful one, because it's not actually countered by the intuitive "but no one would do that".

Amazon's "Recommended for you" page is pretty good, and it's shown me some products I'm glad to own. If we imagine that model on steroids - a carefully cultivated webpage of products I want - I would check it regularly. Just a list of products with text and (optional) video explaining their features and why they're valuable to me.

If buying product X for Y dollars will improve my life, tell me and I'll do it consciously. The evil of advertising, then, is that every appeal to emotion, urgency, or social pressure is an implication that buying product X <i>isn't</i> going to improve my life, or at least that I should be prevented from deciding that rationally.

Modern advertising is a horrible combination of poor targeting and a race to the bottom.