I would suggest a minor adjustment, they fall flat due to a lack of visibility and public acceptance. Advertising is only one such way to achieve that. Unfortunately advertising is capital-driven and there is only partial overlap of products that make the world better and capital. There is also a significant amount of overlap between products that don't make the world better and capital. There are two ways to fix this problem, one is to find ways to drive more capital to products that make the world better, the other is to find better ways to drive visibility and acceptance that don't revolve around capital.

They fall flat because they aren't keeping up with poorly made products that have all their budgets put into advertising.

We can keep flipping this as long as we want. At the end of the day, it sucks that companies get a bigger (short-term) reward by dumping more into advertising and marketing than into the product itself.

While advocating the use of Open Source software at a fairly large corporation I used to work at, a common refrain was "You get what you paid for" I eventually started replying to that with "So we get marketing, and lunches with sales teams?" It actually worked a bit.

I agree.

I’m curious about all these world changing wonder products that just aren’t popular because a marketing agency wasn’t involved in manipulating... I mean educating the public.

That wouldn't be so much a problem if there wasn't already such an extreme level of advertising of shitty products to begin with.

It's like how advertisers often claim "the internet wouldn't exist without advertising".

What they really mean is all the sites (composing the majority of the internet now it seems) which have such little or negative instrinsic value that they must rely on click baiting, psychological manipulation, and selling out to advertisers would die out -- leaving only those sites which provide enough value that people care to pay for themselves, like it used to be in the "good old days"

This is actually another reason why advertising is bad. The reason why those hypothetical products would "fall flat due to a lack of or poor advertising" is because of the noise created by other advertisers. Cut that noise out, and suddenly very little would be needed to effectively communicate to people about new products.

I think this is because people do what's comfortable for them. A lot of technical founders don't want to go outside of their comfort zone when that's exactly what they need to do to help their product succeed AND grow as a person.

Edit: This regards all forms of product promotion, not just paid ads.