Selling = Sofa is $999 and that is a good price for a good couch.
Abusive advertising = This sofa is so wonderful that hot women are going to seek you out to have sex with you.
When advertizging starts selling lifestyles is where it becomes abuse.
For example, my car's cooling system was leaking. I had a devil of a time trying to figure out where it was leaking.
It turns out there's a perfect product for it - a device that pumps air into the radiator. You spray some soapy water around, and where it bubbles is where the leak is.
So in 5 minutes I could have found the leak, rather than wasting a great deal of time because I did not know such a tool existed.
I'm sure there was a point in the past where something like this would have been taught in school in a classroom that had all kinds of tools and machinery in it.
I found out about the company I've bought several sets of sheets from because they were a podcast sponsor, I happened to need sheets, and I liked their designs more than other ones I was seeing at comparable prices. If I hadn't heard that ad, would I have still found sheets I liked? Maybe! But is that really a convincing moral argument against those ads?
In the front of the Mag between the articles you would have full page colour ads, some with skimpily dressed women selling boxed games, computer games etc.
In some of the mags, some of the articles were reviews of products, some of these reviews were obviously promotions, very much trying to sell the product. Very few were critical of the product under review.
There is a continuum in advertising from simple "this product exists" to "Will change your life". Far to many of the adverts we see today tend to the targeted "change your life" category.
Add to that that many of the ads on the internet have there own tracking built in that allows your existence to become a product that is sold without your knowledge or consent and you have a situation that has a bunch of moral questions to answer.
[edit spelling]
Additionally, you can argue there are many buyer's counterparts to advertising. At its most simple, the buyer has many tools to find items they want, i.e. search engines, etc. Additionally the buyer in many cases can inform the seller of an offer (generally below their desired pricing) and the seller can choose to accept or not. In some marketplaces, the buyer can effectively put out a request-to-buy, e.g. an open offer that many potential sellers can see and one may choose to fulfill.