Media advertising really started about 1850-1860, when there were mass-market goods produced that required advertising to create a market. Yes, there were earlier ads, largely of the classified variety, selling one-offs (often real estate).
You didn't have advertising without mass production, mass literacy, and mass media.
Hamilton Holt wrote in 1909 of the effects of advertising on his industry in Commercialism and Journalism, a short, easy, but highly informative read:
Even if we only take the age of the printing press in Europe, it's still over 500 years of advertisement without tracking.
Even if we only take the age of mass-produced media, it's almost 200 years without tracking.
Yes, there were earlier ads, largely of the classified variety, selling one-offs (often real estate).
People were not literate.
Printing and publishing were expensive.
There were very few mass products.
Wikipedia: "The history of advertising can be traced to ancient civilizations. It became a major force in capitalist economies in the mid-19th century, based primarily on newspapers and magazines."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_advertising
The point is scale and pervasiveness.
Barkers, criers, the odd promotional papyrus or clay tablet, a shop signboard, are not the mass advertising of the latter 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries.
Mass advertising, such as it might be thought to exist, was largely propagandistic, in that word's original sense.