Did it need any more data points? It's fairly incredible that it is legal that we are being bombarded 16 out of 24 hours per day with sponsored messages in one form or another. The only medium that is still inviolate is books.

Not so inviolate. There are a number of companies (usually high end designer brands; think Prada and jewelry) that commission authors to make books featuring their products. This has been going on for years, but I don't know the efficacy. Then again, no one really knows the efficacy of any kind of advertising.

Even Ian Fleming did a lot of product placement in his books. Though not sure if he was paid for it.

Ugh, that never even crossed my mind. I'll be on the lookout for it.

"The only medium that is still inviolate is books."

Mostly. I actually have some very old books lying around - with advertisement for various, non existent products in them. But gladly I have not seen any open advertisment in any modern book.

Shush, you'll give them ideas ;)

Isn't it what it's supposed to be? I mean, their purpose is to persuade me do something that I otherwise wouldn't want to do (usually, to buy some product). How is this not hostile to begin with?

I'm a big critic of marketing, but marketing is supposed to do a lot of stuff. Perhaps persuasion of the form you have experienced is the worst they could do. First of all it should understand a market in order to help build a fitting product, and afterwards it should educate people that might stand to benefit from it, about the existence of said product and the benefits.

Somewhere along the line I think marketing people found themselves singing to the choir of intrusive ads, just as devs find ourselves singing to the choir of Agile (with a capital A) and whatever else might fancy those on top.

In a perfect world, the purpose might be something like, to inform us about things we would already want if only we knew about them.

The human mind is more subtle.

It's like why most people in real life don't say "hey, I'm open to sexual intercourse, just in case you were wondering".

Some kinds of information are simply not desired at all times.

Advertising used to be benign things like alerting farmers to an improved plowing technology in a trade magazine. Then companies realized they could get away with selling an unneeded/worse/disposable product if they just outright lied about it, and took advantage of the goodwill the public had towards advertisements to reap profit.

Nah, it's worse than that. Bringing morality into it would actually be better; it'd be easier to understand and rally against if companies were doing this because they were "evil". But they aren't, they're just greedy and want money.