Or virtually all trade magazines, Auto Trader, swingers' magazines, plenty of hobby magazines. There are tons of things you buy for the ads. MaximumRocknRoll in the 80s and 90s, the reason you bought it was to find out where to buy records, the articles were extras (and they told you what records might be good and what bands might be good to see.) Their coolest co-publishing thing was issuing guides to all of the clubs and other vendors in every city and state that touring bands needed to book.
These are all ads. The enemy isn't ads, it's an extremely intrusive and adversarial advertising industry posture.
Ads are useful, they tell me where and what things are available. The problem is that everyone uses the methods originated with patent medicine to sell everything.
The methods of selling patent medicine are simply the methods of confidence men; the "medicine" was probably just some unholy mix of alcohol and mercury. Patent medicine marketing emphasizes secrecy, because they're usually mostly frauds; and also because to any extent they are not fraudulent, they want to be exclusive and not copied. Patent medicine marketing also emphasizes leads, surveillance and secret dossiers. When you're selling dreams, you have to know what people are dreaming about; you also have to know how much they have to spend.
Our advertising problem is a legislative problem. We find it very difficult to police this kind of behavior because it is so widespread among the powerful (and is usually what got them powerful.) It is also completely rational behavior because the methods of con men will sell more regardless of the quality of the product i.e. a good product sells even better using underhanded methods. So there's simply no way to protect your world from being run by the best con men without creating legal obstructions for them.