This is what the term "Marketing" means: it's about creating a market by injecting demand into the marketplace. If people aren't aware that a product exists, they can't demand it.
It's easy to focus on Budweiser ads, because those are the memorable ones. But only ~50% of advertising spend is brand advertising [1]. Most advertising isn't about making you feel less cool, or promising increased sex appeal. It's about identifying with a customer, calling out a problem they're having, and educating them about a solution to that problem.
[1: I'd love better evidence for this but this was all I could find: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1108407/share-of-brand-v...]
This is quite a bad faith description of "performance advertising".
For example, I just went to wired.com and saw:
- Many ads for some sort of business-related website, looks like an mix of Slack and Google Calendar with some extra bells + whistles.
- A Outbrain block with junk like "Top 25 photos of..." and "You would be surprised about ..."
While none of those was interesting to me, none of them made me feel "pathetic" either.
What you mean is, they want it after being told how this and that it is, how utterly special, how pathetic they are for not having it, how bad they look without it, and a spell of desire and want are cast over them, to covet thing $x.
So many things, are only a thing because someone else has it.