That's where we disagree. Imagine you always cooked your noodles in a pan. This is clearly a suboptimal situation. Then you see an ad for a pot, you go buy it and it turns out that making noodles (and other dishes) could be so much easier!

Sure, you would not have bought a pot otherwise, but this ad would have been a net positive for you and the ad company, no downsides.

Or maybe you see an ad for a Chinese restaurant, so you try it and it turns out you really like them. There's nothing inherently wrong with their food just because you got to know it via an ad.

As stated above, the current system is stupid. But it's not all bad.