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No, you're making a static world assumption. In a world without marketing, consumer directed information venues would pop up. You would have e.g. magazines (/blogs/whatever) that users paid for that would ferret out interesting new products that their viewers might be interested in. And they would have drastically better incentives.
For example, take Ozempic. I found out about it thanks to ACX. Was he paid by Ozempic companies to put up that post? I don't think so. In a world without ads, there would be medical journals that specifically focused on upcoming treatments with honest evaluations because that's what their revenue source would demand! In fact, even with ads, we already have medical journals that they already have to put in a bunch of effort to make sure they aren't biased by their funding sources.
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