My Theory: Advertising is a lot like capitalism itself
Both ads and capitalism are messy and have some externalized harms, but are better than the alternatives.
In the "advertising led" model of customer discovery, businesses advertise to essentially tell the market that they exist and provide a service. They do so by paying for advertising space across various mediums. This includes everything from their store signage to Craigslist ads, to TV and sophisticated digital advertising.
Most modern advertising is an auction where businesses compete to serve their message to customers the algorithms think are most likely to be interested.
This function - of matching users that might be interested in products to businesses providing products - is at this point hugely scaled.
People who want to ban ads will usually give the alternative of a reviewed directory of products and services for each category. That, they say, would be the ideal method of product discovery, along with word of mouth.
However, that runs immediately into the same problem that communism has historically. Who actually controls these directories, which would be a huge source of power for society? I posit that that it is impossible to centralize this effectively, and that the most likely most effective method for idea and product dispersal is something close to modern marketing and advertising.
Some is doing an awful lot of work there. Both ads and capitalism have become so degenerate and abusive that I'm no longer confident that either are better than the alternatives. Even phrasing it as "better than the alternatives" is a symptom of one aspect of the overall decline: seeing everything as an either-or choice.
Capitalism works very well within boundaries. When those boundaries expand too much, capitalism becomes degenerate.
The ideal is a strong state which polices capitalism so that we get the benefits but not the harms.
You seem to understand capitalism as "freedom" and communism as "government control". These false definitions are what leads people to believe Democrats or Nazis are leftists, when they're very far from it.
Really, capitalism is that thing where when you work harder your boss gets richer. Someone else besides you is the owner of the products of your labor. Capitalism allows the capital-owning class to use the worker class as machinery for a free ride through life.
Socialism (communism isn't quite the right word here) is "worker ownership and control of the means of production". Yes that has included tyranny in the past, but modern socialists are mostly of the libertarian type and totally reject government control of anything.
Yes, advertising is a lot like capitalism, but that's because they both serve only to redirect productive capacity towards things which the parasitic class wants instead of what we need. Advertising convinces you to buy useless trinkets and to think in ways you never would have thought otherwise.