Its more akin to brainwashing. The most effective brainwashing technique is to repeat a falsehood over and over and eventually the subject integrates and believes it. This is exactly what advertising does and unfortunately for society it works.
Exactly, this is why the selfhosting community is full of user testimonials on how great tailscale is or how beneficial it is to funnel all of your traffic through cloudflair.
A new user will read that over and over and think I guess this is the consensus on how to do things.
The problem is there are no bots out there telling you that there are well proven open source tools that have been around for half a century that solve the same problem and there is no need for these 3rd party commercial products.
Advertising works and covert native advertising and unbiased "user testimonials" is very effective at shaping opinion, especially in a bot driven ai world.
The danger of advertising is not that it is able to brainwash you into changing your opinions. The danger is that repeated exposure to inauthentic stories changes your expectations, and plants paying advertisers in your memory.
This in turn allows your behavior to be controlled, especially in aggregate. You will remember company X sells a thing you want and go buy it, or you will think other people think company Y is environmentally friendly so you will pick them for your vegan barbecue party, or you will have heard of company Z and not automatically skip over their offering in a store. But since it all operates by tampering with your heuristics instead of trying to bowl over your adopted, explicit opinions, it doesn't trigger any of your protective responses.
And that's why you should never view an advertisement.