> 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.
This is quite a bad faith description of "performance advertising".
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...]