How much worse could it be, compared to getting money for working hard on pointless zero-sum advertising pipes?

Don't get me wrong, there is a certain base demand for advertising where it adds value to an economy, but beyond that it is just zero sum redistribution. I do like my ad-money and the skills I maintain working for it, but like much of the services economy it is mostly a redistribution scheme, one where everybody attacks the pie with a vastly different size of spoon. Massive amounts of resources (at the end of the chain: limited natural resources) are spent on those spoons.