Another way to look at it is that the best minds are thinking about how to optimise capitalism.
They are doing that and in effect we are all getting a better more efficient society. Plus the best minds aren't working on world peace because people vote for people with the best hair to do that job.
That only really makes sense if you think that ads are providing information that's relevant to people's best interests and is going to be fed into fairly rational decision making, rather than exploiting cognitive biases as an attack vector.
The "while not bothering the rest" part effectively doesn't work, though. People who will never buy anything from an ad in their lives still get ads served to them, because the cost of serving ads is roughly zero.
The facts that ads are paid per click and not per impression creates more ad impressions, not more efficient ones.
I think there are a lot of people who claim to not be influenced by advertising but actually are. Just because you’re not clicking on ads doesn’t mean they’re not succeeding at influencing your behavior:
