Advertising is a negative sum game[0]. Helping smaller businesses without budget compete with larger companies on advertising is just contributing to making life worse for everyone.

There's no evening the field, only deepening the muck. There's no persistent advantage possible here, because whatever new cool thing a small business can do, a large business can do more of it and better

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[0] - It's a zero-sum game in the sense that everyone's effort only serves to cancel out the effort of their competitors, but it's hugely negative to society in absolute terms, because all that effort burns labor and natural resources.

There's an argument to be made that if everyone is doing it then it will stop being effective and brands will have to start reaching for more honest forms of marketing/advertising their product. I think we've already gone through a cycle of this with influencer marketing where a decade ago, if a Youtuber recommended a product it had a lot more weight (eg. I could actually imagine a lot of creators using Audible/Squarespace) than today where most people realize it's just a way for them to make money and doesn't really hold much weight.

Not just labor and resources, but attention and time as well. It's literally burning up the brains of our youth. Of course, so is the "content" between the ads but you can make an argument that without the ad incentive these things wouldn't have gotten so bad in the first place

> There's no evening the field, only deepening the muck.

While I generally agree, I think if we the consumers do more to level the playing fields from our vantage point, we can have more influence

This would be done by running more ad blockers and being vocal about our rejection of how bad ads have become, so they hear back (in theory...)