>you can lobby your local city or state to pass laws against obnoxious billboards, but at some point it is someone else's property
Such bans are completely possible and within the rights of a local jurisdiction - they're just extremely rare and not something society generally seems to care about. In actuality, branding and advertising is engrained in our culture. I hear friends talk about their favorite ads all the time - instead of the TV show the ads interrupted. I know a very large number of people who watch the Superbowl "just for the ads". I can't convince anyone who visits me in NYC to skip Times Square, because they really want to see that pit of blinking ads for themselves. Many moviegoers love how the theater wastes 15 minutes of their time playing previews (i.e. ads). I could go on and on with my biased examples :)
My point is that we are a consumerist society; anyone who has worked in advertising lives off of this fact and knows it's true. The real problem is internet advertisers took it way too far.
