That’s exactly it. When I was dirt poor, basically half of the people around me had a phone with a cracked screen, and a good amount of that also had batteries that didn’t last much at all. Not only was it a constant game of finding a public power outlet whenever you’d be out for a while, but even staying home, you couldn’t do much of anything that would drain your battery too hard. There was a thing at the time where some phones had batteries that kept turning off unless you hit them on the side until they worked again, but it was a while ago so maybe that was solved by manufacturers since.

It’s incredible now that I live in a middle class neighborhood, how literally every single phone is perfectly functional. It really does change everything.

Anyway, that kind of population would happily get a free TV with ads. Now whether it is the kind of population that those ads would be most effective on is another question, since they basically have zero spending power.