If ads were merely about being informative, they would be boring. But ads want to manipulate, so they have to be flashy and appeal to your emotions.
They pollute your mental headspace, and have no place in a healthy society.
Let's ban billboards. And then let's follow that up with a general purpose ban on paid advertisement.
Advertising is how small and new companies can reach customers. It's how monopolies are broken. It's how progress reaches the masses.
Yes, it is willfully intended to change people's behavior. So are many of our posts on HN. That is an important purpose for communication!
Large companies already have a huge advantage over small/new companies in that they have much more money to spend on marketing and advertising. If anything, banning paid advertising helps level the playing field.
People will still find out about small and new businesses if paid advertising was banned. In fact I learn about most smaller players through word of mouth and other non-paid sources.
If by any chance this is a legit question, i feel the answer would be too obvious: asking people, googling, going to a store you think could sell the thing you want, etc. There are many many pretty obvious ways of finding out about stuff, without needing to have a corporation "reach out" to me and shove their shit everywhere in the form of ads.
Nowadays, when i want to find out about something, i don't just query Google about it, i usually make sure to add "site:reddit.com" to that query, precisely to avoid getting swamped by unuseful ads on the search results and instead have a change at getting to actual data from actual people. In this sense, ads are not only not useful for finding out about the stuff i want: they are actually hampering my ability to do so.