and yet... Marketing is super important. If you've got a good idea, people need to know that it's there, or else that idea won't exist for much longer.

There's a product that I knew about, and it was essentially a sprinkler system you fitted to your home radiator. The idea being that if the room got to a certain temperature (like, say, when the room is on fire), the water inside the radiator would get too hot and burst out of this little plastic thing on the end of the radiator as steam, dousing the fire. It wasn't there to save lives of people in the room, because the room would have to be so hot that everyone inside would be dead, but it would stop the fire spreading to the next room.

They had lots of tests done, video evidence of it working, but nobody would buy it because they insisted on doing all the marketing themselves, and they were shit at it. The guy who invented it spent more time arguing in comment sections than actually advertising the product. If they'd hired a marketing firm to actually sell the product, they might have been able to sell it to more than a single council's social housing stock. A lot of investor money went down the drain because of that project and because the ego of the inventor couldn't be kept in check.

One exception is I like some ads while watching TV shows/movies in a group. They're a built-in break for me to run off an go to the bathroom, get snacks, etc. They're still generally too frequent, but too many is better than none.