also one should always be skeptical about the extent they believe they are not influenced by ads. that runs pretty deep. you say you instinctively don't trust it. but when the time comes to buy something, you won't automatically steer yourself towards a product that you have never heard before just because you have not seen an ad for it. having some names in your mind, even them showing up when you do research creates influence.
Such a belief purports that the effect of all advertising is measurable. It clearly is not. For example, someone sees your ad and decides your company is reprehensible. They were not a customer and they decide to never interact with your company. It's not possible to measure this. Anyone claiming it is holds what amounts to a religious belief.
The "generates negative returns" is the next myth in this. Whether or not advertising generates positive returns is not relevant. You can't measure the return of advertising in the first place. Even if you could measure it, you should be comparing it to the opportunity cost of not doing something more productive with that money. Which you also can't measure. No one rationally proposes that someone spends a hundred dollars on advertising to generate $100.10 in revenue is somehow a good use of money.
What on earth? You obviously haven't worked on anything related to sales. It's clearly measurable: An advertisement is shown one day on TV, for example, the sales the next day are higher. That's the case 99% of the time. You can say it's not, and you can call that "religious belief", if you want to.
Companies use ads because they work, obviously. Everybody thinks they are somehow "immune" to advertisements because they are "smarter than the rest", but the sale statistics are plain and simple.
But it's Google's and Facebook's best interest to make people believe that they do, no matter the reality.
What they actually do is increase sales by some measurable margin (not always great, but not zero either), while causing all sorts of negative effects (spam, scam, misinformation, all those "influencers" and "engagement" farming causing mental fatigue) that are just waived away and/or swiped under the rug of ignorance by the industry adepts.
Scroll back ten years - even back then Google and Facebook made people believe in a literal myth that they're so Big Data they know people better than they do themselves (I kid you not, I heard this cliche way too many times), when in fact their best systems had extremely limited knowledge of both the audience (like very basic demographics that are not even always accurate) and advertised products (a few pieces of metadata at best). Heck, even modern LLMs have limited awareness so they struggle to make sensible recommendations a lot of time (and are extremely expensive for use in advertising at scale) and I'm talking about orders of magnitude simpler "targeting" systems back then.
Advertisement industry literally preaches advertisement, because their very well-being (aka market valuation) depends on it. I'm (a nobody internet weirdo) hold an opinion that it harms society more than it does it good by boosting the economy.
But Google's approach is questionable. Yes, they make money, but that's not the only effect the have. They pushed this story about targeted ads, it literally became a heroic myth blown (stories of what's really some cost-shaving statistic optimizations got blown out of proportions and became preached like all this crazy Big Data hoarding is the only way to go), and that had quite severe negative effects on the whole world - so I'm not sure those revenue increases were worth it.
I think, I need to think it more through.