Cigarettes don’t need advertising though to stay on your mind, nicotine does a pretty good job of that. I agree with you for things people need, or are addicted to, but there are a lot of things that need advertising to keep there growth.

Like car insurance is a necessity and a fixed market, you aren’t going to buy more insurance or buy it more frequently, so their advertising is mostly to maintain their current market position. If the insurance companies all stopped advertising, their profits would probably go up. But cars you can get people to buy more expensive cars more often and expand the market if you advertise to the people enough and convince them to upgrade. If all the car companies stopped advertising, then people wouldn’t see the need to upgrade unless their car is broken, so there would be fewer car sales, and the market would shrink.

The enemy of this infinite growth scheme called capitalism is satisfaction. If you don’t have a product like cigarettes that generate dissatisfaction from their absence, then you need to create that dissatisfaction with advertising.