Comment by makeitdouble

Parent's point about ad being close to propaganda is key: people getting advertised at are often not the ones with the money.

For newspapers for instance, Exxon or Shell could be paying a lot more to have their brand painted in favorable light than the amount the newspaper readership could afford to pay in aggregate.

The same way Coca Cola's budget for advertising greenness is not matched by how many more sales they're expecting to make from these ads in any specific medium, but how much the company's bottling policy has to lose if public opinion changed too much. That's basically lobbying money.