Do advertisements add enough value to my existence to compensate me for the time lost? Not rhetorical, I think it's a good question. Having some commercials while watching TV may be the only reason I have something to watch on TV, I can appreciate that. But in the paste decade or more, commercials have consumed such a large portion of the time of TV, that it was no longer worth the time investment to be constantly interrupted, taking 30 minutes of my time to watch a 15 minute show.
I guess I would use that as an example. Another staggering fact that I learned while in school is that about 50% of the cost of enterprise software is marketing, If you pay $10k for some software, about $5k of that cost was convincing you to purchase it in the first place. I understand that to some degree that marketing is a necessary evil, but holy crap!