> that is what ad-infested society does to everyone… you end up spending money on you sure think you were going to already

Your followup example of this is an impulse buy that happened adjacent to ad exposure. For that particular confluence, your theory could bear out.

But I'm not sure folks do that with any regularity. And for folks who rarely impulse buy or don't see/hear ads in spaces they control - I don't think they run into it.