I came across an advert which, to paraphrase, said 'True quality isn't in the quality, but in the brand'. It was an aspirational advert trying to suggest that driving the car would make you extraordinarily happy. There are a lot of such advertisements, trying to use brand rather than quality. I find the sale of fake dreams objectionable, and will consider this and other side of branding: the creation of social status.

there are numerous psychological studies suggesting that people were as happy years ago before current technological innovation. Famously, lottery winners and paraplegics are about as happy as each other a year after the event.
Advertising creates desires that people did not have. When it tells people that they can buy an emotional state (which is generally utterly untrue) it breeds discontentment.
Advertising helps markets by making markets closer to the assumption of perfect information. When it oversteps that boundary and starts doing more profitable things like creating new demand it's detracting from human society.
There have even been studies specifically on cars, which find that people drastically overrate the importance of car brand in their decisions. Most modern cars are decent and comfortable but people pay a premium. Those who spend that premium on something like a memorable holiday report themselves as far happier afterwards.
One could say that if you're going to be irrational, you pay the price. But demand lowers prices and therefore affect me. I don't want high demand for pointless goods and low demand for things I value that could have higher production because then I have to pay more. If that high demand is artificially created by playing on human frailty then I will continue to argue that this is a bad thing.
Furthermore, I rely on the rest of humanity for progress and social goods. It takes more than just me to do research, uncover new truths, and to maintain the environment. If humanity is distracted by artificially-created desires that do not contribute to these goals then I suffer. I have no measure of the value of goods that were bought to replace items that already did the job well, nor the value of the human labour that went into them that could have done research. I wish I did.
 Growth is currently the target for our policitians to chase, rather than something like the Gini coefficient or even just low unemployment (which does at least get some mention in the news). Growth is measured by transactions, with the assumption that these transactions create value.
Advertising that creates an as-yet unfulfilled desire is not creating value for people: it's destroying people's overall 'sum' of value in their lives.
Therefore chasing growth could lead us to consume finite natural resources even faster all for the sake of satisfying desires that don't even need to be there.
The argument for consuming finite resources now is often that growth necessarily implies technological innovation that will benefit future generations more than the resources will. If growth is actually fuelled by satisfaction of arbitrarily-created desires in the current population, then this argument makes no sense. 
I think there's a distinct problem with selling the idea that one can buy social status in society as a whole. There's no doubt that amongst, say baseball card collectors, acquisition of a rare player buys status... but no baseball card collector would assume that the purchase will impress anyone else, and most collectors do it for love of collecting, not the status.


As soon as adverts start trying to persuade people that anyone can buy status that should impress the whole population, two things happen.
Firstly, people buy status because we're more homo rivalis than homo economicus or sapiens, and we compete. That means that everyone else buys status who can. So the end result is that if you paid, you're as happy as before but poorer, and if you didn't, you're unhappier because you have less status than others.
It's a vicious cycle that can simply repeat itself until everyone is both poorer and unhappier, except the very rich, who have bought it all but find that it doesn't bring the happiness they see in the adverts, and they still have hopes and dreams that are sometimes dashed.
Secondly, everyone who has invested in this system therefore has a vested interest in supporting and promoting it and its universality. Therefore interesting and otherwise content people, like our baseball card collectors, who have separate social hierarchies, can be mistreated because they aren't conforming and thereby justifying someone else's investment. Obviously that's most apparent at school, but I don't think the attitude suddenly dies in adulthood. People who have been told by an advertisement that a purchase will buy them respect get frustrated and angry with those who do not grant extra status, rather than with their own beliefs.
As a sad and lonely misfit myself I found that spending time with out-groups was very pleasant. Typically even those with other interests were happy to deal with and respect someone who was polite and tolerant. This was not the case with those who believed that their mainstream culture was more than simply just a bit more popular (or who believed that popularity mattered, failing to distinguish between mob rule and democracy). Those who believed that their own culture was universal expected to be treated as having status by everyone, even when they had achieved it through things that the rest of us did not respect.
The assumption of universality is of course shockingly unpleasant when it comes to other things, like religious dogma or other moral codes. Here, instead, it just makes for false dreams and intolerance.

Of course, I would like most of all if the assumption of universality of status from purchases solely intended for status were to be replaced by status from well-chosen purchases of any sort, or even better, with status from character.
But if people accept that status within their small group of like-minded people does not translate to status as a whole, I think they'll be less likely to rely on it and more likely to use more universal means of dealing with others, such as politeness and other virtues which anyone can appreciate and respect.

And, if that settles in, we might even begin to find people valuing the judicious use of leisure time for self-improvement, rather than to earn more money by working overtime in order to buy more status. And if people no longer associate high incomes with social status, I think that the competition intrinsic to humanity will find a new outlet. If people give status to leisure time, we'll all be required to work less. If people give status to knowledge, we'll see more research. Anything would be an improvement.