Then when you're at the store or buying a service, you are more likely to choose a product you are familiar with. Even if you don't consciously acknowledge that familiarity.
Nobody is immune to advertising - the people who fool themselves into thinking they're immune are less likely to notice its effects.
I'm not talking about people who think they are immune to advertising, I'm talking about people who take active measures to reduce its effect on them—be it technological (adblock), sensory (muting) or psychological (disdain). I would argue that people who think they are immune to advertising are not motivated to do any of these things.
In any case though, I have never seen any data or research that supports that common truism that "nobody is immune to advertising". If anything, it may be true that nobody is immune to some kind of advertising—not to generic advertising per se.
It is well accepted that advertising should be targeted by age, income, culture, educational level demographics. An ad designed for American teenagers probably won't work well on a middle-aged Indian lawyer, and an ad targeted at Indian educated professionals is not well suited for a 20-something Italian mechanic. So how can we assume that an ad that works on a person who makes no conscious effort to block or avoid ads will work just as well on a person who is constantly taking active steps to avoid them?
Someone pulled the wool over your eyes to sell you ads if you believe this. Maybe they even showed you a study they funded.
If users would want to make Youtube change its policy, there's a better way: get together and start acting like a click farm. If you click every ad on every page and immediately open the tabs you opened, advertisers will start paying Google for nothing. Something like a subreddit coming together would definitely have a noticeable impact on larger advertisers.
The AdNauseam approach to ad blocking isn't great for the security side of ad blocking, but it'll hit advertisers where it hurts the most: their wallets, and being forced to expand filtering (potentially flagging more users as false positives).
It's for this reason, I'll never use it. Some kind of automated headless version of AdNauseam that could be installed on a Raspberry Pi is something I would be more comfortable with using.
I ran AdNauseam for a while but in combination with a PiHole the result wasn't interesting. Every clicked link ended up blocked by PiHole anyway. Perhaps it's for the best.
I wonder if one could set up an isolated VM that can click these links for you in a Firecracker style 5 second VM isolated from anything important. It could probably run in the cloud, all you'd need to do is forward the GET/POST request the Google Ads redirect causes and let a virtual browser do its thing.
The devil's advocate argument against your second to last point is that you'd actually be getting higher value from getting an ad on the eyeballs of an adblock user, because your ad is a bigger slice of the total ads they might see in a day. Do you want your ad to be 10% of the total ads somebody sees, or 0.5%?
I have a special reserve of hatred tucked away for advertisers who take up that much of my consciousness. It's top-shelf, cask-conditioned hatred. Rare, excellent stuff.
The most pervasive ads that I get whenever I accidentally go to YouTube without adblock are for Liberty Mutual home insurance, who already refused me as a customer years ago. So yeah, it just serves as a reminder to tell people they suck.
That's exactly what I do when something manages to slip past my blocker. I also mute my TV and pick up my phone when ads start playing.
I don't generally hate the brands though. I understand there are some perverse incentives at work in the market which means they have to spend money on advertising or be outcompeted by others who do. I blame the advertising industry itself. There's one exception though: where I live, some businesses are so obnoxious they pay people to drive around playing loud advertisements all over the city and in my neighborhood. Those certainly get my utmost hate. I'd blacklist them forever but I can't even understand what the ads are saying anyway.
This is fraud and immoral, according to some people here...
Best case scenario, frustrated ex-adblock-users will ignore my ads by muting them or looking away, so I'm paying the same price for less value, sometimes as low as zero. Worst case scenario, these users will actively despise my brand and avoid it altogether because they will associate it to their disdain for YouTube ads, so I'm paying for negative value.