Note: I'm not really super pro-ads, and I've never worked in the advertising industry. I don't like the existing hyper-advertised world we live in.

> Both sides spending billions on marketing would result in roughly the same outcome as both sides spending nothing on marketing

This is an assumption not backed by data. But its pretty much impossible to truly test this hypothesis at any real scale. What data we do have is if many brands stop advertising when they used to do advertising, they tend to start to lose sales. But, as you point out, their competitors didn't necessarily reduce advertising as well, its not testing "what if everyone cut advertising".

> But if your product is so great, why haven't I heard about it via things like independent reviews or personal recommendations already?

Its an assumption these people would have even found the product in the first place, or were willing to give it a try, or even know the product category or type exists in the first place, and that this organic growth would have happened fast enough to keep the product alive. If everyone is basing their decisions off word of mouth, are there really going to be enough people in your network to buck the trend and give a scrappy new competitor a go and have their opinion make decent enough waves?

A world without any advertising at all seems to me to be a place where entrenched names in markets end up dominating based purely on people practically never finding the competitors. They become the default, the go to. This still largely happens in this over-marketed world today though, I do agree, but I think that's more of over-consolidation of producers and distributors having an outsized say on what we see in a lot of physical stores.

That world without any advertising also leads to some things not being made that would have otherwise existed, things that people generally like. Lots of magazines and other publications practically live off some amount of marketing, and they largely exist as a format for people to go see what's happening in a given industry. Lots of things like sports leagues/teams rely on sponsorships. Would there be Formula 1 racing if they didn't have those corporate sponsors?

I do agree especially internet advertising is largely destroying the internet. I don't understand how anyone uses mobile web pages without an ad blocker these days. Its absolutely terrible looking at anyone else's phones that doesn't block the ads, every page is more ad than content. We've definitely gone too far.