There is this series of television advertisements for a (proprietary) mobile video game, which I will not name for obvious reasons. The advertisements are pretty much "this is a game; get it because it has no advertisements and you can play it without the internet".
This advertisement is stupid for quite a few reasons.
Firstly, the game is not only proprietary software, but also includes (likely predatory) in-app purchases. These will make people lose money, all for a few fake things in a game. Of course, the existence of these in-app purchases is only mentioned in fine print at the end of the advertisements. While these are important issues, I'm not going to focus on them here.
Secondly, the advertisements barely talk about the gameplay of the app (a generic match-3) at all. It only mentions that the game is ad-free and can be played without the internet. Some of the ads mention that the game is "fun", but that's it. This is the problem I want to focus on here.
Constant, targeted advertising and computers tethered to other people's servers (what Big Tech calls the "cloud") has become so widespread that "no ads" and "no internet required" are enough of a selling point to get users to your program, even if it is a bad program otherwise.
The crazy thing is that there's an entire world of software, free software, that not only respects your freedoms, but is objectively better functionality-wise. Yet all of this superior software is less commonplace than their proprietary counterparts. These programs have the same feature-set of "no ads" and "no internet required", but nobody's flocking over to install those programs.
This is likely because people don't know about these superior alternatives. Free software (as the name implies) doesn't make that much money that could be used for advertising. To prove my point, I haven't seen a single ad for the following:
However, I have seen ads for Windows 11 computers, Macbooks, iPhones, Android phones, companies pushing the destructive technology that is "AI", proprietary VPNs, and proprietary software in general. This is probably because, since proprietary software companies make more money, they have more money to advertise to new users.
I guess the moral of the story is that if we want to get more people to use and be aware of free software, then we have to advertise for free software. People won't switch to something superior if they don't know something superior exists.