Advertising, you appreciate it more when it isn't there.
It has two meanings:
Advertisers like to promote the notion that if it weren't for advertising that something you appreciated wouldn't be there for you to enjoy (cobblers! most of the things I've enjoyed, needed, or simply used, I'd never seen any adverts for).
But, for most of the rest of us, we generally think of the meaning that we prefer not having to put up with advertising aimed at us all the time.
In recent years it's got more and more obnoxious. We used to be subjected to just thirteen minutes an hour on television, now it's virtually unlimited, and it used to be much more tasteful. Now we've got some yobbo yelling insanely at us every second advert, and we're inflicted with the same adverts being repeated during one advert break, never mind the next one, as well. These days I mute the sound during the breaks and avoid buying anything marketed that way.
The other side of the coin, being an advertiser
Being in business means that I'm forever being pestered by people hoping that I'll spend money advertising through them, and they won't accept being told that they charge too much, and that their product doesn't advertise me in a way worth the amount of money they want from me.
Where I am, we have the Yellow Pages business directory for the whole state, which has jacked up their prices incredibly over the years (what was $600 years ago is now $2000), and has always been an over-priced cash cow for them. Then they brought out a smaller, so-called local version, as well. Which means you end up buying two adverts, one in each book, they hope… It's not really “local,” as far as I'm concerned, when it lists for areas that you'll spend over an hour driving to. It's a pointless book, just brought out to extract more money from businesses.
In recent years our local council has decided to bring out a local business directory (a third thing to spend money advertising in). This one wants even more money than the Yellow Pages does, for smaller advertising. They like to try and tell me how popular they are, but that fell apart when I was able to see exactly how little the number calls their book generated. Last year they put my advert in the wrong category, along with just one other business, with the same size advert, and during that year I received the grand total of four phone calls querying me over jobs for that category.
It confirmed what I suspected, that others do what I do: We've found the local books don't list all local businesses, and often don't list enough to make a decent set of enquiries. So, after experiencing that a few times, you ignore the local book and go straight for the full Yellow pages, which lists just about everybody.
So much for competition. The advertising competition's virtually pointless, and competition didn't do anything to push the pricing down.