I do not think that I have ever seen on the Internet a helpful ad. When I want to buy something, I search what I want or I go directly to online shops that I have used before or to price comparison sites.
Nonetheless, mostly before the appearance of the Internet, when I was reading various technical journals, especially during the seventies and the eighties of the past century, e.g. magazines or journals of electronics or of computers, I was considering most ads as helpful, as they were making me aware of various things that I might have wanted to buy.
Unlike the ads that bother me today, those ads in magazines or journals intended for more competent buyers contained enough technical details and prices to make possible comparisons between products, and they were also easy to skip when not interested, instead of covering important content on a Web page and making efforts to provide a visual distraction that makes difficult to focus on the useful content of that Web page.
The Internet ads are completely unhelpful because they are never about something that I intend to buy in the near future. The most stupid thing is the fact that after I have searched for something to buy, I am bombarded for a long time with related ads, but that is exactly when with certainty I am no longer interested in that kind of ads, because I have already bought whatever I had been searching for.
> "The most stupid thing is the fact that after I have searched for something to buy, I am bombarded for a long time with related ads, but that is exactly when with certainty I am no longer interested in that kind of ads"
Please see this comment exchange from 3 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37218627
> "the correlation between $just_bought_thing and $will_buy_another is very, very high ... Showing someone ads for products in a category they recently purchased from is one of the most effective things a store can do ... the data is exceedingly clear."
I'm sure it's one of the most useful signals for the advertisers, but it is also one of the most irritating behaviours for the consumers, because even if this is a very high correlation in advertising terms, it's still the majority of the time not actually accurate for the consumer (like with all ads: I buy some orders of magnitudes fewer products than I see ads, even with adblocking, so even if I only bought things I had seen ads for, the vast majority are not helpful to me).
If you're researching which fridge to buy on Gemini, then an ad might be helpful. So long as they've got the data to answer your questions such as how wide it is.
But only if that result contains all the facts, and doesn’t show only the fridge that they have an ad for while there also other fridges that fit.
Advertising really only helps in two scenarios - it makes you aware of a class of product you had no idea existed (perhaps searching for toilet paper shows you a bidet ad) - or it makes you aware of a brand you hadn’t considered before.
And even the second is on shaky ground because by design it won’t tell you really where it stacks up.
I suppose you could argue that making you aware of sales/deals is “helpful” but that’s closer to what I’d classify most advertising as - zero-sum.
(Advertising of a different kind has a use, allowing companies to “sponsor” activities they like in a way the shareholders won’t revolt over. The more you consider companies to be feudal lordships the more it all starts to make sense.)