So, where does that leave advertising? The entire purpose of advertising is to get somebody to spend money on a product they otherwise wouldn't have.

Advertising has specific legal limits on what is deceptive. You can say ‘worlds best’ because that’s considered a subjective and meaningless statement, but lying about objective facts gets you into hot water. For example, peanut butter is legally required to have been made from peanuts.

It is called "puffery"[0], for anyone who is interested.

The wikipedia page says a "puff piece" is journalistic puffery. Neat, I hadn't made that connection.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery

You going to work also serves the purpose "to get somebody to [give you] money they otherwise wouldn't have". So that definition is obviously too broad, and different from the definition of fraud mentioned above.

Advertisement tends to deal in opinions, not facts. And where specific factual claims are made against better knowledge it does constitute fraud, and is occasionally prosecuted. See Volkswagen's emissions claims, for example. Or, just this week, some hand sanitiser got hit by the FDA for claiming protection against Ebola and Coronavirus.

To be more precise, the elements of fraud include a false statement, made knowingly, upon which someone else reasonably relies, to their detriment. To prosecute, this pattern must not be merely plausibly true but persuasively true in the face of a motivated, skilled defense. That set of circumstances is only rarely true in advertising. It is clearly true here.

People get sued for false advertising al the time. I feel like people on hacker news are continuously surprised to discover that laws exist and are enforced.

And when they are enforced they seem to think that laws can be hacked with cutesy little games to a judge.

“The use of deception” is key, and it’s true that advertising often crosses the line, and should be prosecuted more often.

The advertising industry is hated by many people for exactly the parallels you've perceived.