Calling it an "uneducated attitude" is a bit of an ad hominem, and could just as easily be flung in the other direction, at the attitude that takes some sort of naive Economics 101 justification completely uncritically, without being familiar with the history, practice, and theory of marketing/advertising.
I agree that at its best advertising is matching, basically filling in an information gap. But it often does the opposite, exploiting an information gap / ignorance; in fact it's often explicitly and completely unapologetically aimed at doing that, looking to create and exploit information asymmetries. You make more money by selling people an expensive version of something they can get equivalent cheaper, or by luring people into a contract whose full cost they don't realize up front. There's a reason advertisers tend to read up on behaviorist psychology, because exploiting weaknesses in human decision-making, to encourage people to allocate their resources in a way that they wouldn't do with perfect information, is a big part of the game.
I may just know the wrong people, but I don't actually know anybody in marketing who doesn't have a sort of cynical "tricking suckers into buying our clients' stuff" view, at least some of the time. That's the game; you don't last long in the business if you have a purely idealistic view of only matching people to quality products that are a good match for them, especially since at larger firms you often have no choice about which products you're supposed to be selling.
I agree that at its best advertising is matching, basically filling in an information gap. But it often does the opposite, exploiting an information gap / ignorance; in fact it's often explicitly and completely unapologetically aimed at doing that, looking to create and exploit information asymmetries. You make more money by selling people an expensive version of something they can get equivalent cheaper, or by luring people into a contract whose full cost they don't realize up front. There's a reason advertisers tend to read up on behaviorist psychology, because exploiting weaknesses in human decision-making, to encourage people to allocate their resources in a way that they wouldn't do with perfect information, is a big part of the game.
I may just know the wrong people, but I don't actually know anybody in marketing who doesn't have a sort of cynical "tricking suckers into buying our clients' stuff" view, at least some of the time. That's the game; you don't last long in the business if you have a purely idealistic view of only matching people to quality products that are a good match for them, especially since at larger firms you often have no choice about which products you're supposed to be selling.