Are you just going to ignore the rest of advertising that isn't "scammers advertising to its customers", and makes up the overwhelming majority of their revenue?
specifics are not relevant in many cases. capitalism does not care.
It definitionally manipulates people into buying stuff they didn't want before, leaving them poorer and our world devoid of more resources.
This applies to the mom-and-pop selling something around the corner, not Coca-Cola. For Coca-Cola, their advertising money likely has negative returns at the scale they spend it.
If it's good, their friends may even tell them about it.
Why does it need a whole manipulative extraction industry around it?
It doesn't, especially at the aggregate scale it is at!
That's an abstraction, though. The real-world logic behind that statement is that by bringing net benefit to The Whole (through your chosen acts), you will be duly recognised as a contributor of value, and accordingly you will be busy.
The way that modern formal terminology (like Notification Brings Business) has become a set of self-standing tenets in its own right has let humanity forget that our entire motivation for this whole practice of being busy ("busi-ness") is to make everybody happier. Preferably by doing things that don't suck.
Not to 'Maximise Our Business'.
You give notice about your business, but it only becomes advertising by virtue of the socialised energy expenditure it takes to process the unsolicited imposition en-masse. Thus it is an economy of scale, leveraged by a singular entity.
Conceptually we might look at the simple Market Hawker. He finds that changing the environment to impose his message at scale (by loudly shouting at 30-second intervals) increases his revenue.
Abstracting that core mechanism of advertising into business jargon allows us to frame it as "giving notice about our business to increase revenue with more or bigger transactions". Nothing about that statement is false, after all. So a completely true balance sheet of the advertising proves that "Costs = I Shout, Revenue = Business Is Good". Pretty good deal. Really good deal, once the scale rides up, and he has a loudly-shouting-man installed at every corner.
Business balance sheet is very good, now. Revenue = Business_Is_Good x 500, Costs = 500 Men Shout. This is a very beneficial abstraction indeed. Formally omitting the scaled social and environmental costs of our business advertising by simply not including the vocabulary for those things makes it a wonderful revenue-increasing tool.
What are you talking about??
But offline advertising generally isn't exempt. Screw billboards cluttering up cities. Screw flyers cluttering up my mailbox. Screw print ads cluttering up magazines.
It's all an assault on the senses in service of extraction. It's a non-consensual invasion of the mind.
I expect for most people that these forms of advertising - directory listings, basic notifications, etc. - aren't a level of cognitive pollution that they notice vs. overly bright billboards, banner ads, search injects, or LLM-injected marginally relevant sources.
I think generally, the issue is around consent and who initiates the information transfer. If I'm actively looking for something, a listing of options is useful. If I look at a shop window, I am actively looking to see what the shop is selling.
It's the non-consensual invasion of my mental space I take issue with. It's like somebody violently shaking you going "BUY BUY BUY".
This is the core of it for me. There are many, maaany companies that don't want to be what they are. For example: Meta doesn't want to be a social media company - so it lets facebook rot, makes 10% of its total revenue from scammers advertising to its customers, which seem to mostly be vulnerable old people and focuses on VR and AI.
I guess Proton is having that same problem. I don't really want to be part of that though.