I'm baffled that so many people think advertising is a recent invention.

Do you genuinely believe there were economies anything like the modern luxuries we enjoy that also didn't have advertising? That advertising was an add-on that appeared at a later date?

We have plenty of archaeological evidence of advertising in ancient civilizations.

Advertising isn't new.

Possibly? There have been advertisements for at least 2500 years. It's very likely that as long as there has been an economy as such, there have been business owners promoting themselves.

Yeah they probably had fewer advertisements back in the good old days, but they also had a much smaller economy, producing a whole lot less than we produce today. [1]

And you might not like everything about the world today, but living in a vibrant economy where people create wealth by building new businesses has led to more comfortable lives for the large majority of humanity.

[1] - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-gdp-over-the-long-...