There are effective bans on advertising for certain products, e.g. cigarettes, in large parts of the globe.

Which are acceptable because people generally (in many places), are fine with discouraging, or certainly not promoting, the use of tobacco products (and some other product categories) even though they're legal. This is not true with the usage and purchase of most other legal products.

The irony is that, as with anti-smoking, massive ad campaigns would be necessary to convince the citizenry to favor a ban on ads. Time for "the ad to end all ads?"

Banning advertising in general actually sounds more feasible than banning poorly-defined "targeted advertising".

It's very simple actually. No more sponsors, no more covering every square meter of public space with brands, no more commercials on TV, no more ads on websites. People will have to find other ways to make money, no one's entitled to a business model.

Most (in fact, almost all) advertisements are not on “public space”, they’re on private properties.

Alright, then ban displays of advertising if it has to reach eyes that didn't ask for it, the same way we ban pornography, gore or violent stuff on display.

So, does that mean everything has to be packaged in the same grey form factor as to not advertise their product? You walk around a city and see lots of Coca-Cola branding on the bottles people carry around. That's also advertising.

If you don't ban this, then whomever can pay the most at stores for product space would take over the market. Actually, that would likely happen even if you remove labels since people will be picking essentially at random.