IMO, the purpose of advertising is to skew an impartial assessment of purchasing options, such as my own or some other's survey and comparison of options, or to just induce demand (think of those carpet bombing ads on sports radio, for tax remedies, divorce help, cures for droopy dongles, and so forth), and so on, often using scare tactics. Homeland Insecurity showed up recently, threatening immigrants. So it goes.<p>I do seek out reviews that are as impartial as possible. Some provide them, and make their living from affiliate sales (note that really bad reviews are rare in these cases)<p>But I can't cover the downside as well as George Monbiot in a landmark article [0]. "Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we're hooked on it." (2011)<p>And political advertising? It's outrageous since "Citizens United" allowed unlimited spending by interest groups. It's all calculated propaganda war, based largely on cognitive biases [1] and prejudices.<p>So as not to be all negative, there is some real benefit to advertising of events and useful sales (not just loss-leaders)<p>FWIW, I do listen to sports talk radio, but on a YT stream that miraculously silences the radio station's ads almost entirely, do not watch TV, and use ad-blockers on the internet, so I practice what I preach.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/advertising-poison-hooked" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/oct/24/advert...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases</a>