I feel an urge to scream it into the world every single day just how much i despise ads and whoever invented them.

If you are like me and just like reading history for fun, even the history of things like advertising, there is some actual interesting history there. Advertising goods for sale basically goes back as far as recorded history does. We have examples of adverts from the Song dynasty. These tended to be fairly innocous though. Basically just signs advertising a product sold at a shop.

Modern advertising, the more invasive kind that we hate, unsurprisingly got its start in the US. All the advertising execs that basically set out with the goal of exploiting human psychology to sell product are from the early 1900s in the US/UK for the most part. Nielsen and the dedicated advertising agency came a bit later. Thomas Barratt (UK) was one of the worst, he famously bought the rights to a painting and then added a product he was selling to the painting. The artist hated it but couldn't do anything about it.