Thank you so much, I'm glad it landed with you!
The difficulty balance is a little up in the air atm, but we did put a good amount of thought into how to make it challenging but not too hard.
There are some obvious synergies and some less obvious synergies, but Edo really took the lead on balancing them out and I'm glad their ideas mostly came to fruition right at the end of the week!
The advertisements are actually one of the last few things we added and although they're definitely required for balancing purposes, we did originally plan on a much more robust advertisement system with like 5 different types that had different effects besides just swapping popularity for money. I was pretty sleep deprived and didn't have the energy to really do that system justice, but that's just how the jam sticks. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The version of advertisements we ended up with is one of the things we had to scale down in the last day or so of development time, but I'm glad we could still make it work in the version of the game we eventually arrived at.