I work in digital advertising. I manage several billion impressions a year in ads spend and over $15M a year. I think it's easy for engineers to undervalue the importance of advertising. Without marketing, many many well-engineered products would never be discovered. This is why marketing is considered a core function of business. It speeds up the integration of new products and technologies into the general society. It seems like you're lumping all advertising for all products into the same category. It's more likely you just don't like seeing ads for products you don't like. And this is the goal of contemporary digital ads: To only show products to users who are likely to purchase them.
Human beings have ideas that organize themselves into formal groupings that need to be formally promoted in order to sustain the cost of the business. Products need to rapidly scale. And marketing/advertising makes that possible. Hating advertising is like hating the dollar for being necessary to exchange value in society.
We need advertising to make the products you engineer viable business ideas. Without advertising, 99.9% of good product will never be discovered.
In a free market, we don't dictate what someone needs or doesn't need. We believe the individual has a right to choose amongst options that are presented with truthful claims. If someone pays for it willingly, they needed it. If we start attempting to break down all the extrinsic motivations for purchase decisions, we'd see almost ALL of them are dictated by social acceptance, comfort, and convenience. This is a feature of a wealthy nation, not a bug, that we can seek out goods and services beyond basic food/water/shelter/safety needs.
Human beings have ideas that organize themselves into formal groupings that need to be formally promoted in order to sustain the cost of the business. Products need to rapidly scale. And marketing/advertising makes that possible. Hating advertising is like hating the dollar for being necessary to exchange value in society.
We need advertising to make the products you engineer viable business ideas. Without advertising, 99.9% of good product will never be discovered.