I don’t know what adverts for e.g. perfumes and scents are like globally, but where I’m from there’s literally zero informational and objective content. It’s 100% imagery and association - how do you assess the truth of the olfactory in terms of the visual and auditory? It sounds like the assessment of truth in explaining eyesight to the blind - inherently problematic.
Perhaps this is an extreme example, but all the rest seem to be shades of the same thing - begging the question of how much truth can you appear to be portraying whilst maximally subliminally manipulating and deceiving in order to maximise the whole purpose of advertising in the first place. I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that advertising stands in direct opposition with truth, only able to deceptively achieve truth through lying beneath appearances.
Yes, I’ve seen this argument a lot - it revolves around the assumption that surface adjustments are the best we can do, like with mainstream politics. That is to say, given the economic model, adverts are the “best” solution to continuing the economic model. But instead of justifying the depths we have to sink to, the obvious other angle is to question the economic model itself.
I think the current economic model can be traced back to the Division of Labour, which is certainly a strong basis. You might think that the alternative (self-sufficiency) would appeal to individualists - but politically Individualism appears to be entrenched in a socialised division of labour. The society-wide division of labour has a great deal of efficiency going for it.
The reason Division of Labour is the basis, is because it is the foundation of the need to trade - self-sufficiency requires no trade, but as soon as you share out tasks to allow specialisation, trade is required for specialists to acquire the other things they need that they aren’t producing, and everyone else mutually benefits from the higher quality of what each specialist has to offer.
So with the need for trade established, the question of whether it is voluntary or not arises.
Trade is not just a question of what you buy, obviously - voluntary trade of course appeals to pretty much everyone: to buy whatever you want. It’s also nice to be able to pick what trade you want too.
But you can’t buy whatever you want for what are accepted restrictions of: what’s on offer & its pricing. And you can’t pick whatever trade you want either, because you can’t sell what others don’t want. Even voluntary trade in the current model is not voluntary for many reasons - what even is the question of voluntary trade or not? It’s a question of what aspects of the voluntary can be mixed with the inevitable restrictions of the necessary.
So with the need for trade established, the question is over what ratios and arrangements of the voluntary that we can have.
That is to say: there is no such thing as a free market - as exemplified perfectly by advertising.
If a company cannot impose a price restriction on what you want to buy, they still need to want to supply what they want to sell. Apparently the current solution is to replace price with a forced investment in your future purchase of other products where prices can still be imposed. This begs the question of what happens once prices can no longer be imposed on other products, due to upcoming technologies like free energy - neither advertising nor pricing will work as necessary accompaniments and antitheses to the notion of the “free” market.
Perhaps the application of “the voluntary” will no longer be able to go to the choice to produce anything to sell - i.e. production will become mandatory.
This leaves only the “freedom” to buy what you wish, and the ideological notion of “free” market becomes even less justified than it is already.