Advertising is adversarial. Period.
Not telling people about your thing. That part is fine — necessary, even. You made a good chair; you'd like the people who want a chair to find yours. That's a business talking to its customers.
Advertising is the other thing. Advertising is what's left when the message has to fight you to get in.
It's the ninety percent of the page that isn't the article. The video before the video. The thing between you and the recipe, the thing you close to read the sentence, the thing that followed you here from the last site and already knows what you looked at. You didn't ask for it. It isn't for you. It's aimed at you.
And the people whose page you came for don't love it either. They resent it — especially the morning the platform changes the rules without warning, and the traffic they spent a decade building is just gone, because a dashboard somewhere decided. They aren't advertising's beneficiaries. They're its hostages.
The tell is what the whole machine does when it runs out of things to sell. I once saw a billboard advertising a website. The website advertised a television. The television, I can only assume, advertised something else. A hall of mirrors with no room at the end. No chair. No there there. Just the thing, pointing at itself.
Because the product stopped being the point a long time ago. The product is the excuse. The business is the auction in the middle — the one that takes a cut from the advertiser, a cut from the publisher, and your attention from you; sets all three of you against each other; and calls it a marketplace. Everyone comes out a little worse except the house.
A message that has to ambush you isn't communication. It's a fight someone started without telling you.
Advertising is adversarial. Period.