Funny enough advertising was relatively small part of the economy until the last several decades. Now it is an "industry" in the multi-trillion dollar range.
Even funnier, if Google search worked effectively for product discovery the vast majority of advertising would not be necessary.
Good point. Maybe the death of advertising comes when some entity knows us so perfectly well it automagically provides the exact thing we want/need exactly when we want/need it.
Google used to for me at least from around 2010-2015 +/- a few years. It was incredible. Now it is usually very hard to find anything I want via search. I suppose a certain amount of defect in search results is optimal for the ad business.
Even funnier, if Google search worked effectively for product discovery the vast majority of advertising would not be necessary.