advertising brands: good or evil

personally, i think it's a bit of a nonsense question - one of those things that middle-class twats like me have the time to ponder. regardless, a good banter at work this week exposed the following:

• advertising has the potential to be evil and manipulative and needs to be heavily regulated.
• brands playing up to youth strategies like "pester power" need to be careful about their moral grounding.
  
• we mustn't forget that brands can still play an important role in simplifying the decision making process.
• enables companies to invest longer-term in developing a brand image to improve sales.
• advertising pays for the content and people tend to hate paying for content more than being exposed to advertising.
• advertising revenue encourages media owners to develop new content and the more targeted and fragmented the media (eg. the web), the more opportunities for niche content.

this is obviously an incomplete manifesto, but a decent start-point for discussion...