We measure what advertising does for the advertiser. Impressions. Clicks. Conversions. Sales. Return on investment. CLV.
We rarely measure what billions of advertisements collectively do to everyone else.
The interruption. The mental effort. The commercial use of shared space. The repeated images of particular lifestyles, bodies and definitions of success. The gradual replacement of meaning with messages designed only to provoke an immediate response.
Cultural pollution is the cumulative damage caused when commercial messages take more from culture than they give back.