There's different types of advertising though. And it's not necessarily blatant advertising that's the issue.

A lot of ads are designed differently. Article form. Informative video content. A promoted Facebook post that ends up in your feed. Really any type of content that's pretending not to be an ad.

That's advertising too. And that too, influences people. About tonnes of things. Not necessarily products.

And think about it inversely too. If there's 2 groups of people posting ads: if group 1 has more money, they can effectively push group 2 out.

These too are part of the problem.