Unfortunately, you’re misinterpreting the purpose of advertising. What you and I expect, logically, is what I used to teach the kids I trained back when I worked at a fish market. I told them, “Your job isn’t to convince the customer that they want something. They already know what they want. Your job is to use your knowledge to inform them so they buy what they need instead of getting what they think they need.”

However, this isn’t traditionally what advertising is for. Traditional advertising is about taking a shotgun to that Venn Diagram and blowing a hole through the entire circle because it’s cheaper and easier, and will grab people from outside the middle too. Take Coca-Cola, for example. Everybody knows what Coke is, they have no need to advertise to make people aware of their product. They could save billions by not advertising and people would still know who they are and what they sell. The reason that they put so much money into advertising every year, plastering their logo on billboards and TV commercials and the like, is because they want to plant their product into your subconscious. They don’t expect you to see an ad for Coke and go out and buy some, though they’d love it if you would; what they want is the next time you go to buy groceries or order food at a restaurant, you’re going to get a Coke since their product is in the back of your mind. Car ads are about making you remember that clever ad you saw the next time you’re planning on getting a car so you’ll buy their brand. Not on the merits of the cars themselves but on the ad sticking in your mind. It’s easier to get somebody to buy something based on them remembering a catchy jingle on the radio than to convince them that your product is better than the competitors. Shops like Temu are based entirely on getting you to buy stuff you’re not interested in, simply because “it’s such a good deal!” and if you don’t buy it now, you’ll miss out on the savings!

Targeted ads are just about increasing the likelihood that you’ll view an ad by making that process more efficient, often by violating your privacy as an individual. Advertisers don’t pay per clickthrough, they pay per view. As far as platforms like YouTube and Facebook are concerned, you’re the product that they’re selling to the companies, and tracking everything you do is just about finding the right companies to sell you to. You being happy with a purchase is just a side effect of that transaction. It’s why if you look up technology patents, you’ll find stuff like televisions designed to track your eyes to make sure you’re actually watching the ads or prevent you from muting the TV during ads. This is why Google is cracking down on adblockers so hard right now. People who use adblockers are statistically less likely to click on an ad than people who don’t. But YouTube doesn’t care about that. They care that those people aren’t viewing ads and therefore they can’t charge advertisers for those views, even though forcing people with adblockers to see ads would actually reduce companies clickthrough rates so they’d be paying YouTube more for less. Ironically, it’s in both advertisers and people who use adblockers best interest to prevent Google from ruining adblockers.