Of course advertising isn't necessary. People will find what they need. The point of advertising is to create a need, and after that, make sure that this need is fulfilled by a specific brand. People might find the best product on their own. But companies don't want you to find the best product. They want you to find their product.

I don't get the downvotes - I actually found this to be an interesting comment, thinking about what would happen if we had a mechanism for product discovery other than the kinds of advertising that we get today.

What I find even more mind-bending is that since premium brands often come from the same production line as cheaper brands, you're actually paying a company a premium to to convince you they're worth the premium for convincing you even more they're worth ... you get my point.

Obviously the importance of it depends on the product, and some things don't do it at all, but there is the consideration that although two products came from the same line, they were branded according to how well they passed QA.

Sometimes they keep the same overall brand (see: Intel and AMD disabling defective cores) and sometimes nobody even pretends that the product you are buying is not the result of failed QA for another product (bags of broken pretzel bits), but between those you get a fuzzier line. I have heard that consumer batteries do this for example: the weird-brand batteries that come in your remote control from the factory are probably rebranded batteries from a company you have heard of.

You're right and everything is going to change. On the other hand it isn't technically completely true.

Advertising and sales, are product info and persuasive information.

Product info is relatively straightforward I think. Persuasive information is credible information about the buyer that explains why the product is needed. The reviews on Amazon serve this need. The websites of camping enthusiasts or cooking enthusiasts etc etc serve this need in Google.

They aren't going away, the work is being done by entities other than the manufacturer. They're being outsourced to amazon or the buyers peers, but the work still needs to get done.

I live in a world as free from advertising as I can make it (AdBlock + no tv + no radio), and I do get along fine.

What's interesting is that advertising that doesn't concern you isn't as annoying as advertising for products that you're able to buy. I love The Daily Show, but sometimes, for some reason, it only works with AdBlock disabled.

All ads on The Daily Show are for American products not available here (fast food brands that aren't present in France, cars that don't exist here) and those ads don't bother me much -- they don't clutter my brain the way an ad for something I could buy does.

I turned adblock off the other day to debug some chromium issues, and forgot I had left it off.

Did you know they now have video ads where you have to type the text of the product slogan if you want to skip the ad?

It's a bit annoying.