Why Groupon and AdWords are important and advertising isn’t.
Advertising has become quite spammy and irrelevant. We’ve gotten away from the core issue, which is not inherently spammy at all – merchants interacting with people to retain their existing customers and win new customers. There is nothing evil about that, and the direction that advertising has taken for decades has been largely disrespectful, manipulative, misleading, and lacking in creativity. As a result, it has become quite boring.