> Since when have we considered ads something helpful?

Depends. Ads a low-effort large-reach pathways for lead generation, mostly useful for B2C penetration.

I also did sales when I ran my own company, and I can absolutely guarantee that ads can be helpful. When talking to leads you're talking to someone who a) never saw what you offered but is listening to you anyway, or b) saw what you offered and decided to contact you.

The very first thing I'd do in sales is try to determine if the person I was talking to had a) A need my product could satisfy, plus b) Authority to make the purchase, and c) The budget to actually follow through.

The last thing I wanted to do is spend a bunch of my limited time talking to people who never had any intention of pulling the trigger on a contract; those are much harder to convert to paying customers (not impossible, just harder) and were almost never worth the effort.

My best-case scenario was "Someone reached out to me". Ads are a way to make that happen.

Now, if you're talking about internet ads, then you're talking about a different beast altogether (B2C), and those ads can be helpful to purchasers if they were already in the market for $FOO.

The problem is that internet ads are almost never worth the money - a significant number of clicks are from bots, another significant number are from accidental clicks and only a tiny tiny number of them are from people with the intention to buy $FOO from somebody, and they are just checking our your $FOO offering to compare.

An ad is never helpful because ads are designed to mislead me into buying something I didn't need or knew about before I saw the ad.

If nothing else, an ad cannot impartially compare a product with the competition (and sometimes the "competition" is buying nothing at all), therefore every ad lies.

If I already needed or knew about it, I didn't need the ad.

If I was happy with my life without the product advertised, I didn't need the ad.

Furthermore, ads are fueling our capitalist, consumerist economy that is destroying the planet. Ads are a literal existential threat to humans.

You argue that ads can be helpful... by saying all the ways ads are helpful to the business. That's not what Google means. It's a way to make ads not sound like an obnoxious shitshow by pretending they are helpful for the consumer. The only way they are remotely helpful is to let someone know about a product they didn't know about. But that's not what ads are really for and we all know it. They're for manipulating people into buying a product, but whether they need it is purely coincidental. The admongers can stop pretending otherwise.