Not sure why this is downvoted.

Either advertising is effective to some degree, in which case banning it would necessarily help curtail consumption.

Or it's ineffective, in which case it would necessarily save a ton of wasted resources and man hours.

I would happily defend the position that advertising does more harm to society than good, if anyone is willing to reply in good faith instead of just cowardly downvoting me into oblivion.

Just look at the cosmetics industry, the fashion industry, and the modelling industry. Industries that arguably provide next to no tangible worth to society, are run by sketchy people and wreak havok on the mental health of young people, girls especially. They're terrible for the climate, you got companies like HM using child labour, and generally inhumane working conditions, to create low quality clothes that break quickly, so they can sell even more. These industries are pretty much completely dependent on advertisement, and devoid of moral and ethical fibre.

Then look at IKEA, running ads bragging about their refurbished furniture, while their business model still relies on cheap, illegally sourced wood from the Balkans and planned obsolescence. Why are they allowed to so falsely represent themselves as "sustainable"?

Then you have the whole surveillance capitalist industrial complex of Facebook, Google, etc. Heavily ad based business models.

The ad industry is clearly out of control. It's a tumour on our society.

I probably wouldn't go as far an outright ban myself, but I would definitely welcome far, far more savage regulation of it.

It's downvoted because its a broad populist statement that isn't actionable in that form and doesn't provide any value to the discussion. In contrast your take is a lot more nuanced and something that actually can serve as a basis for fruitful discussion.

Banning advertisment outright is about as realistic as banning humans from communicating.

That's fine, but pointing that out, like you did now and providing a cogent reply like I tried to almost always leads to interesting discussions, I've found. The trolls run away at the first sight of real discussion anyway, most of the time.