> “Companies survived for centuries without internet ads, tracking, targeting, etc.”

As far back as ancient Rome, vendors still used advertising and marketing. This included word-of-mouth advertisements and billboards (such as in Pompeii before the volcanic eruption). [0]

In the 1900s, newspaper advertising was a major source of advertising. Now that fewer people read print newspapers, advertising has shifted to internet ads and email newsletter ads.

Technology evolves, and marketing evolves to keep up. Even non-profits have significant marketing investments today. I encourage you to actually try to run an organization, for-profit or non-profit, and try to sustainably achieve the mission while rigidly adhering to the ideal that companies shouldn’t use marketing.

[0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/4387300.pdf

> This included word-of-mouth advertisements

This is not really advertising. It's more like a conversation. It's real people talking about their experiences. Advertising is when some phony who's on the corporation's payroll comes to you unsolicited and starts overstating the positives and downplaying the negatives.

There is two things going on here that are getting lumped under the same umbrella. 1) Modern marketing that uses a deep understanding of psychology to treat people as a series of levers to be pressed in order to get a certain reaction. 2) Service discovery. This can be really valuable. Just imagine you made something you were truly proud of and thought would bring value to others lives, or of something you already think is incredible. Finding out about it brought you value.

These two things both get called advertising but we have (quite reasonably) different feelings about them.

> Service discovery

I don't consider this advertising either. If there is a list of services somewhere and people consult it voluntarily, then it's not really advertising, it's information. People are informing themselves about what's available.

For example, I don't consider an online store to be advertising. The whole reason I went there is to see products, so it's totally fine when products are shown. It becomes unethical when they start shoving products in my face everywhere I go.

I was having this argument a couple of weeks ago. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30418664 ) cut-n-pasting from there:

Organic word-of-mouth referrals and recommendations are waaaaaay more effective than any other form of marketing. If you can't develop and sustain word-of-mouth organically then you have to use other less efficient and more coercive means. There are marketplaces that operate efficiently on word of mouth alone. E.g., there are the various "black" markets. There was no appreciable change in availability, quality, or price before and after pot legalization, for example. The high end of most services and products doesn't need to market, they're "saturated" by word-of-mouth alone.

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Going further, you can trace the historical rise of modern marketing directly from military propaganda techniques. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays#World_War_I )