Dang. I would love that. Imagine an economy that doesn’t run on ads and subscriptions. Edit: This.
Dang. I would love that. Imagine an economy that doesn’t run on ads and subscriptions.
Edit:
I think there's a world where we'll look back on our advertising-saturated era with the same bewilderment with which we now regard cigarette smoke, child labor, or public executions: a barbaric practice that we allowed to continue far too long because we couldn't imagine an alternative.
I despise advertising with every fiber of my being, but I think part of it is how "in your face" modern advertising is. Reality is, some advertising always needs to be allowed. New businesses,...
I despise advertising with every fiber of my being, but I think part of it is how "in your face" modern advertising is. Reality is, some advertising always needs to be allowed. New businesses, especially smaller businesses, need a way to reach out and put the word out about what they are selling and why it's good for the consumer.
I've always imagined my ideal "advertising" remedy to fix the absolutely obnoxious state it currently is in would be something akin to a dedicated government run online repository or something. Something where you can go to the site, look up the type of products you're looking for, and then have options populate based on that.
Obviously it's not perfect and there's sooooo many logistical issues that would come with that, but it would get rid of the "in your face" advertising we currently have, and would at least put things back into the hands of consumers so they get to choose when they want to be advertised to in a sense.
This is, as so many problems of modern societies, a problem of not enough regulation Properly regulated advertisement is necessary in societies with so many interconnected people. We need mass...
This is, as so many problems of modern societies, a problem of not enough regulation
Properly regulated advertisement is necessary in societies with so many interconnected people. We need mass communication in many forms, and doing a hatchet job of banning some types of mass-communication is not a good idea.
But banning unlimited spending on political campaigns, restricting advertising, restricting hate speech, restricting "bullying speech" or other systematic campaigns aimed at ruining individual people's lives, and many other areas of society simply need more regulation because we're not in the early 1900s any longer.
I think you described the “yellow pages” lol, but I agree, and I would totally want something like that myself, just a directory with all businesses, sorted by category, and then I can look up the...
I think you described the “yellow pages” lol, but I agree, and I would totally want something like that myself, just a directory with all businesses, sorted by category, and then I can look up the link to their website and/or contact information.
Honestly I was basically thinking of it as akin to Yellow Pages, but digital haha. It just seems like it would be a way better system if it could be properly implemented. I just doubt the...
Honestly I was basically thinking of it as akin to Yellow Pages, but digital haha. It just seems like it would be a way better system if it could be properly implemented. I just doubt the logistics would be feasible.
I also was about to reply “I believe you are describing the internet of the early 1999-2000s.” Before end-game SEO. I’m sure it always had some manipulation of who got to the top of results, but...
I also was about to reply “I believe you are describing the internet of the early 1999-2000s.”
Before end-game SEO. I’m sure it always had some manipulation of who got to the top of results, but it was not the shit show we have now.
One of the functions of advertising is to make you aware of the concept of a product that you may not know existed or a vocabulary for thinking/talking about a problem to be solved with a product...
One of the functions of advertising is to make you aware of the concept of a product that you may not know existed or a vocabulary for thinking/talking about a problem to be solved with a product that you wouldn’t have if you’re not aware of the field. If I had never heard of Yaupon, how would I ever think to look for it? Or if what I want is a way to listen to music what am I gonna search for? Record player? Tape deck? Smart speaker? Sonos? “Thing that plays music out loud through one of those boxes?”
What you’re proposing would require the government to come up with some sort of data model to categorize the whole galaxy of stuff out there so it’s searchable and indexable. A galaxy of stuff that is constantly growing and changing and recategorizing itself at that.
Then there’s the problem where even if I know exactly what I want to the point where I could draw a picture of it, I might not actually know what it’s called. Like I am constantly at a loss about how to buy replacement parts for random things in my house because “long plastic thing with a t-shaped hook on it that curves forwards and unlatches a hook to eject the water filter from my [make and model number] refrigerator,” surprisingly, still doesn’t turn up much when I put it into Google with a lot of additional sleuthing.
I don't think you realistically can have capitalism without advertising. It's illegal to advertise, but what if I tell people about a thing I bought. That can't be illegal. But what if I'm...
I don't think you realistically can have capitalism without advertising.
It's illegal to advertise, but what if I tell people about a thing I bought. That can't be illegal. But what if I'm connected or famous in a way that lets me reach a bunch of people? Maybe it's illegal to be a spokesman or get paid to talk about a product. But what if my brother owns the company and I tell everyone about it just because I want him to do well.
Wait, ChatGPT has part diagrams!? That'll make looking up replacement parts a lot easier. I usually have to search the web and pray someone uploaded the diagram. Q_Q
Wait, ChatGPT has part diagrams!? That'll make looking up replacement parts a lot easier. I usually have to search the web and pray someone uploaded the diagram. Q_Q
Oh, no. I didn’t say that. I meant that something like ChatGPT could be developed that does enable you to find parts by just describing them. I mean, shouldn’t Google Gemini be able to do that now?
Oh, no. I didn’t say that. I meant that something like ChatGPT could be developed that does enable you to find parts by just describing them. I mean, shouldn’t Google Gemini be able to do that now?
My go-to move is to just search for [make, model] parts diagram and try to find the thing. The problem is every website that does this stuff is so loaded down with garbage that they’re basically...
My go-to move is to just search for [make, model] parts diagram and try to find the thing. The problem is every website that does this stuff is so loaded down with garbage that they’re basically unusable, and often the PDFs of the diagrams are so low rez they’re illegible.
What ought to be the industry standard convention now is to have a universal wiki of appliance documentation and every appliance produced has a QR code stamped somewhere visible that I can scan and access them for parts diagrams, schematics, etc. (And for electronics, links to firmware as well). Stop making me look for serial numbers and shit.
I'm going to add a repair wiki to my list of things that we should have..... Oh neat, it exists, but it's rather sparse: repair.wiki - now if every company added their products to it and did the...
I'm going to add a repair wiki to my list of things that we should have..... Oh neat, it exists, but it's rather sparse: repair.wiki - now if every company added their products to it and did the QR code thing we'd be golden. Down side being that many companies don't want us repairing things.
This is the last thread I expected to suddenly find something I have to buy. Had never heard of Yaupon before, thanks for the info! 😁 Guess I'm a case of why ads are needed, but at the same time...
Yaupon
This is the last thread I expected to suddenly find something I have to buy. Had never heard of Yaupon before, thanks for the info! 😁
Guess I'm a case of why ads are needed, but at the same time I've never seen a Yaupon ad so the wrong ads are out there. At this point I use a blocker, unconsciously bat ads away and mentally blacklist, and sometimes actively deter people from, companies that pay for scummy ads (popups, flashing lights, fake articles, fake games, telemarketers, etc...). So imo it's bad PR to get them and those "immoral" ad types should exist.
Like I said, logistically I don't think it would ever work. It's more of a "in a perfect world, this would be my ideal". If logistics aren't an issue, I would imagine the search function would...
Like I said, logistically I don't think it would ever work. It's more of a "in a perfect world, this would be my ideal".
If logistics aren't an issue, I would imagine the search function would also have built in capabilities to ask more long-form questions to get ideas for stuff, or even categories like "I'd like to try out a new tea, I like these properties" and then it would pull up stuff from there.
Once again stressing the point that I know this is not logistically feasible, it's just my ideal in a perfect world.
I'm going to say, no. Unpopular opinion 'round here, I imagine, but I love advertising. . . in the right place, in the right measure. Produced with some creativity. Take all the bills you see...
Exemplary
I'm going to say, no. Unpopular opinion 'round here, I imagine, but I love advertising. . . in the right place, in the right measure. Produced with some creativity. Take all the bills you see posted around NYC. They're sophisticated, and they make me feel glamorous for standing in NY looking at them. It's part of the experience for me.
Advertising is very natural. The birds do it, the bees do it, and man around this time of year, do the plants ever do it! (Ahhhh-chooo!). All advertising really is a form of communication about who we are and where to find us.
That's not to say there is isn't excessive advertsing that shouldn't be rolled back. Commercial breaks in live media are too long and too frequent and perhaps worst of all, too repetitive. There should be some serious guidelines around advertising that involves the public interest. Think political campaigns, ad campaigns by BP about global warming, etc etc. And there should be constraints in all advertising about what can be said and how.
Even if we all agreed that "advertising" should go, it would be an impossible task. What even is advertising? Some advertising is involuntary or negative, and also still useful. You ever sat next to someone needing a shower on the bus? (I know the article says paid, third-party advertising. But what about classifieds? That's third party at least, also paid in many cases. Movie trailers? Church posters? Rock show flyers on the telephone pole?)
So no, lets not ditch advertising. Let's shape it instead to make our lives more colorful and useful.
Birds would create SEO click farms in India if it would help them bang other birds. Just because something is "natural" doesn't mean it can't be perverted and ruined by greed and excessiveness....
Birds would create SEO click farms in India if it would help them bang other birds. Just because something is "natural" doesn't mean it can't be perverted and ruined by greed and excessiveness.
There is no way to have advertising not be an arms race to the worst possible version of itself without heavily regulating and limiting it which would be, by its very nature, impossible to do properly.
We don't get catchy jingles on the radio anymore, we get AI generated rage porn sifted untraceably into our algorithmically managed feeds. There's no putting that genie back in the bottle without a lot of work.
I had half a comment written and realised it was probably too sarcastic which doesn’t actually serve anyone’s interests here. Anyway, I strongly suspect if advertising platforms were held...
sifted untraceably into our algorithmically managed feeds. There's no putting that genie back in the bottle without a lot of work.
I had half a comment written and realised it was probably too sarcastic which doesn’t actually serve anyone’s interests here.
Anyway, I strongly suspect if advertising platforms were held accountable for the contents of their ads, every single one, then advertising platforms would start moderating their ads and that would go a long way to making ads more expensive and also less likely to be shitty.
I imagine if Facebook was held liable for promoting every ad that it held, and couldn’t hide behind “but we’re too big, we didn’t know, we can’t be held responsible because we’re just hosting someone else’s ads” they would pretty quickly moderate the ads that go on their platform.
Sure it’s not a perfect solution, but regulation doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to set up the right combination of incentives to generally result in behaviour that benefits society.
The issue, like with so many regulations, is again that this hurts small and new businesses the most while large corporations will easily adapt. That's bad for everyone, small businesses are good...
The issue, like with so many regulations, is again that this hurts small and new businesses the most while large corporations will easily adapt. That's bad for everyone, small businesses are good (and honestly necessary) for local economies, bring innovation and competition.
I only have experience with selling small numbers of "luxury" products (loudspeakers for about 1k USD with tax, so nothing super expensive, but not something that you really need), but in that area even with todays costs it's not uncommon that in the very beginning, when you're lowest on cash, if you don't get very lucky with word of mouth you spend 800 USD on advertising to sell one 1k product, covering only material costs (which are often higher at the beginning, before manufacturing larger batches). Until the advertising snowballs a tiny bit, you just work for free and hope for the best.
At this moment, it is still often possible to start a tiny business with very little cash if you do it smart, and grow from there. But most of them still fail and most people still never even try. We should think really hard whether any regulations that would increase this hurdle are worth it.
Regulations don't have to be one size fits all though. Like if you're spending under 100k a year on advertisements, that could just be unregulated, and you only start regulating once you start...
Regulations don't have to be one size fits all though. Like if you're spending under 100k a year on advertisements, that could just be unregulated, and you only start regulating once you start spending more.
I don't know shit about advertising, but it doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem to regulate advertising without hurting smaller businesses.
That's the funniest line I've read all week. The arms race comparison is pretty apt. Even if 99% of advertisers were to suddently be chill and keep things clever and respectful, all it takes is...
Birds would create SEO click farms in India if it would help them bang other birds.
That's the funniest line I've read all week.
The arms race comparison is pretty apt. Even if 99% of advertisers were to suddently be chill and keep things clever and respectful, all it takes is that last 1% who blasts low-quality bs into everyone's faces to see some sort of success before everyone else realizes that if they don't do the same thing, they're toast. Seems like a larger problem endemic to the competition and the cut-throat nature of our economic systems.
The "but everything is advertising" arguement is such a cop-out that it honestly makes me upset. Are birds telling you to bug your doctors to get you branded drugs? Are the plants persuading you...
The "but everything is advertising" arguement is such a cop-out that it honestly makes me upset.
Are birds telling you to bug your doctors to get you branded drugs? Are the plants persuading you to vote fascists into public office? Are the birds and bees looking to establish unhealthy habits that hurt the populace in order for them to make more profits? Is the stinky person on the bus actually trying to do something by being stinky?
Clearly, this "abolish advertising" is just wishful thinking. There is no plan and no definitive delineation about what counts as an advertisement or anything like that. So I think it's fair to assume they aren't trying to create an authoritarian state where anything and everything can be banned and excised from society.
Yes, advertisements can be beautiful. Here's an entire movie based on mascots designed to sell beer. But does that look anything like the majority of advertisements you see? No, not even close. Advertisements are designed to steal your attention. And yes, I do mean steal; they distract you from other things by design. TV literally interrupts the show to show you the ads! YouTube will serve you an ad mid-sentence! Radio is full of ads with yelling people speaking at lightspeed!
Would you feel less glamorous if those ads you see in NYC were replaced with art for art's sake? Seriously, why do you think it's better to have advertising there? Do you feel empowered by the ability to spend money?
Maybe ads would be OK if they were opt-in, or at the very least actually relevant to the things I'm looking at. If I am to see a movie trailer, maybe it should be when I'm looking through a directory of movies or film reviews. You know, the reason we call them trailers is because they would play after watching another movie, right? But heck, I wouldn't really be too upset seeing them play before the movie, assuming the theaters would tell me the time the movie I paid for actually starts at.
But as things are, advertisements have measurably negative effects on society, and the people making them are getting away with it because nothing they are doing is illegal. That's bullshit. Worse yet is it's effect on children. Kids under a certain age can't even tell some things are advertisements, and older kids can't tell what claims advertisements make that are bullshit (and frankly, most will probably never recognize all of it). Advertisement in it's current form causes harm, full stop.
But I guess I'm basically agreeing with your last point. Lets shape advertisement to make our lives more colorful and useful. But we have to start with legislating restrictions to what kind of advertisements are acceptable. Like the article says, the advertisers are not going to regulate themselves.
Imagine these as seasonally changing art installations with messaging that isn't bound to specific brands. Imagine we could use this public space for wonder and amazement, or just joy or visual...
Take all the bills you see posted around NYC. They're sophisticated, and they make me feel glamorous for standing in NY looking at them. It's part of the experience for me.
Imagine these as seasonally changing art installations with messaging that isn't bound to specific brands. Imagine we could use this public space for wonder and amazement, or just joy or visual toys or science or for works that make us think or connect with other people without trying to manipulate us into spending money for things we don't need.
Wouldn't that be much more glamorous than a shoddy CocaCola-ad?
It would, but that's so far in the realm of fantasy and "if only everyone would just" reasoning that it's not really worth discussing. Compromises like mandatory style guidelines for...
It would, but that's so far in the realm of fantasy and "if only everyone would just" reasoning that it's not really worth discussing. Compromises like mandatory style guidelines for advertisements pushed by individual cities (or even city districts) are something that actually has a chance of happening.
Advertising is very natural. The birds do it, the bees do it, and man around this time of year, do the plants ever do it! (Ahhhh-chooo!). All advertising really is a form of communication about who we are and where to find us.
Let's shape it instead to make our lives more colorful and useful.
This comment is beautifully written, observant, thoughtful, and funny. I'm disappointed to see multiple replies that are hostile and unfair. You acknowledge some downsides and excesses of...
This comment is beautifully written, observant, thoughtful, and funny. I'm disappointed to see multiple replies that are hostile and unfair. You acknowledge some downsides and excesses of advertising and point out a non-obvious upside of advertising (beauty, glamour, creativity).
If you want to have a complex, nuanced perspective on advertising, you need to find a way to integrate both the downsides and the upsides into your perspective. I'm really tired of black-and-white thinking on topics related to economics, politics, policy, tech, and social change. I don't know why some people have chosen to be so combative toward this comment in particular.
Despite the disagreements in the comments on this post, there seems to be a lot of agreement that some new regulations of advertising would be a good idea. A more constructive path for the conversation to follow: what specific regulations would improve things?
At the bare minimum, the USA needs to stop advertising prescriptions. Your doctor should recommend medicine to you. Not the other way around. Placement of ads, length, etc all should be regulated,...
At the bare minimum, the USA needs to stop advertising prescriptions. Your doctor should recommend medicine to you. Not the other way around.
Placement of ads, length, etc all should be regulated, as another user points out.
The advertising of medication and legal services is one of the biggest failures of the supreme court. There's a case referenced in better call saul that I can't recall at the moment which was...
The advertising of medication and legal services is one of the biggest failures of the supreme court. There's a case referenced in better call saul that I can't recall at the moment which was basically the landmark case that lead to the billboards and ads we get today for these sharks.
My small business, which uses very tasteful but necessary advertising (small niche publishing), would go under in an instant. That said, I understand the plight. It would be so easy for us to just...
My small business, which uses very tasteful but necessary advertising (small niche publishing), would go under in an instant.
That said, I understand the plight. It would be so easy for us to just plaster our website and publication with ads, but we have to fight temptations.
Adding to this. I hate advertising, but after having some experience with starting a tiny startup there is no way I could do without it, as it exists now. Getting people to even know that our...
My small business, which uses very tasteful but necessary advertising (small niche publishing), would go under in an instant.
Adding to this.
I hate advertising, but after having some experience with starting a tiny startup there is no way I could do without it, as it exists now. Getting people to even know that our product exists was by far the most difficult thing for us.
It feels like almost all of the people in this thread have no idea how hard this is in most situations when you're starting out. I think people don't fully realize that so many potential regulations that would work against overgrown corporations which piss everyone off would hurt small businesses even more, which goes against all of our interests, and quite often there's no realistic (let alone fair) way to discern between those two groups.
If you want to know what it looks like to not have advertising shoved into your face at every moment, just take a virtual drive along Hawaii's roadways where billboards have been banned for over a...
If you want to know what it looks like to not have advertising shoved into your face at every moment, just take a virtual drive along Hawaii's roadways where billboards have been banned for over a century.
São Paulo, Alaska, Hawaii, and Vermont are great examples of taming visual pollution. That's a great aspect of it, though I'm convinced the most insidious real estate from advertising is occupied...
São Paulo, Alaska, Hawaii, and Vermont are great examples of taming visual pollution. That's a great aspect of it, though I'm convinced the most insidious real estate from advertising is occupied in our pockets and in our minds.
We also did this in Czechia around highways and "first class" roads (90 km/h speed limit, usually just one lane in each direction but expected highish traffic), which is much easier to push...
We also did this in Czechia around highways and "first class" roads (90 km/h speed limit, usually just one lane in each direction but expected highish traffic), which is much easier to push through than something like regulating advertisements within cities since there's a very clear issue with firstly billboards being designed to take away your attention while you drive and secondly with them being a big hazard when an accident does happen and a car hits a billboard pole - at highway speeds that's usually a death sentence.
During that whole ordeal we realized that some billboard companies are a literal mafia, operating semi-illegally, beating up or threatening anti-billboard activists or even competitors etc. So it took a years long fight (law applies since 2017), but nowadays it's finally done and it's great. Google maps probably won't have it on street view yet.
A great thing is that it brought the issue of the billboard lobby and mafia-like practices to the public, so it increased the number of anti-advertisement activists and made politicians and bureaucrats finally care a bit. Because the issue is that we do actually have some laws that regulate advertisement in public spaces, nothing radical, but there are rules, however neither side gave a shit about them and now they're being forced to, so far only in some places. So the activists don't even need to be radical either, they just push people to do their jobs and enforce laws, which is great because our society usually does not respect too activisty-looking activists but these ones nobody minds.
There has also been some push for local advertisement manuals prescribing things like color schemes and maximum sizes that apply around certain areas (typically historical centers of cities), which can reduce a lot of the visually ugliest and most aggressive stuff and applies even to things like branded restaurant parasols (no branding over xx size and only one allowed color for example) etc. I think this is a great compromise.
I am not sure if it was ever valid. If you see very old advertisements in newspapers from well over a century ago you also see all sorts of wild claims and promises that can't possibly be true....
The traditional argument pro-advertising—that it provides consumers with necessary information—hasn't been valid for decades.
I am not sure if it was ever valid. If you see very old advertisements in newspapers from well over a century ago you also see all sorts of wild claims and promises that can't possibly be true.
Anyway, I do like the thought experiment. I am not sure if it is possible to do it to the degree proposed in the blogpost. Simply because there is no hard line where you can say “yes this is advertising” and where it is organic mouth-to-mouth. But, it certainly seems possible to me to reign in advertising a lot.
It would require a massive shift in society though.
If I were to play devil's advocate the "providers consumers with necessary information" can be as simple as the advertisement showing that the product exists. Back in Texas I recall seeing...
If I were to play devil's advocate the "providers consumers with necessary information" can be as simple as the advertisement showing that the product exists. Back in Texas I recall seeing advertisements for the iPhone that had literally no information about it other than the name and a picture of the phone. If someone saw the advertisement and noticed that the number after the name had changed, that'd be "necessary information" for a consumer that uses and wants to update to the latest version. No specs, no changes from the previous version, just "iPhone +1"
That's still BS, there's much better ways to do consumer information. There's magazines/TV shows/youtubers that do that very well, with somewhat objective comparative reviews,...
That's still BS, there's much better ways to do consumer information. There's magazines/TV shows/youtubers that do that very well, with somewhat objective comparative reviews, safety/durability/taste tests, etc. This is superior to advertising in every way imo. We can have some canals for companies to provide information to people that needs it (e.g. catalogues, website, etc.) but it doesn't need to be in your face.
On top of the "how do you define that?" and "how do you get information out about products?" questions other comments bring up, you're gonna need to either find an alternative way to sustain the...
On top of the "how do you define that?" and "how do you get information out about products?" questions other comments bring up, you're gonna need to either find an alternative way to sustain the vast majority of the Web or lock it off from anyone who can't pay directly for every page they read/video they watch/game they play.
That's why I think a better solution is to make ads less intrusive, rather than doing away with them entirely. Ads are fine if they don't bloat the webpage and aren't flashing casino light at you...
That's why I think a better solution is to make ads less intrusive, rather than doing away with them entirely. Ads are fine if they don't bloat the webpage and aren't flashing casino light at you on the side of your limited real estate as you read.
we may need alternative means regardless, given that even those ads aren't paying the bills for more and more sites. They are sort of leaning towards subscription paywalls for that. It's sadly the only logical means without subsidies or simply figuring out how to make society cheaper to survive in.
Targeted bans make sense. Sure lets get ads out of politics, lets get billboards off buildings and drives, lets get rid of "3rd party" reviews. A "ban on advertising" though is so vague and...
Targeted bans make sense. Sure lets get ads out of politics, lets get billboards off buildings and drives, lets get rid of "3rd party" reviews.
A "ban on advertising" though is so vague and general as to be either pointless or dangerous. You just have people shift what the definition of "advertising" is, because what is a speech about something you like?, and then you wind up with some committee to enforce what is or isn't advertising, and suddenly you've got Trump and Elon out there who magically aren't while everyone who disagrees with them is.
Like many of these things, it feels like a 101 level of "WOULDN'T THIS BE REVOLUTIONARY! ITS BECAUSE MEAN PEOPLE WON'T ALLOW IT", which like, yes that is in fact a part of it, but there's lots of other reasons these things are the way they are. Plenty of people have spent their lives looking into and trying to fix/adjust these things. We had MUCH stronger laws targeting children before the internet, which let companies take a second stab at "hey look what's wrong with Joe Camel though?", and they mostly got away with it.
Part of the reason they got away with it is because of technical illiteracy and money in politics going to those who'd back them, but another is a lot of people saying "oh yeah freedom of speech", because advertising and "moral code" style laws were frowned upon as religious right nonsense only. Which, yes it was, but also there are reasonable lines.
So in short, this really doesn't feel like it's bringing anything new to the real conversation around this. It's straw man arguments for the opposition (i'm willing to bet I could find several examples of advertising they would consider free speech, especially when they bring up propaganda) or naive/hopeful stuff from their side.
I'm not against people wanting to make things better, but I get annoyed when it reads like the sports fan who's certain if they were the coach their team would've won, having never even played the damn game and can't even quote you half the real rules.
I'm just going to say that Dorothy Sayers classic mystery story Murder Must Advertise already features many problems with advertising in the 1920s. Also, making forms of speech and trade illegal...
I'm just going to say that Dorothy Sayers classic mystery story Murder Must Advertise already features many problems with advertising in the 1920s.
Also, making forms of speech and trade illegal was tried by Communist regimes and it led to black markets and abuse.
But regulation of time, place and manner could work for large advertising campaigns I think. We could create advertising free zones for our sanity.
No one wants it/ needs it now. Banksy People get creative. It might look like graffiti tagging. It might look like email spam or phone scams that are sourced in another country. I'm confident that...
People get creative. It might look like graffiti tagging. It might look like email spam or phone scams that are sourced in another country. I'm confident that means and methods we have never thought of would be found and tried.
If you read about prohibition, people found and distributed booze.
Oh dang, yeah, now that you pointed out graffiti and spam I can see it now. It'd be like viagra spam or those car warranty phone calls, paying randos to paint coca cola bottles on walls "not our...
Oh dang, yeah, now that you pointed out graffiti and spam I can see it now. It'd be like viagra spam or those car warranty phone calls, paying randos to paint coca cola bottles on walls "not our fault some hooligan likes our product".
Booze might not be the best example, the target audience actually wanted booze. I doubt they could do much with how many actually want ads.
Oh right, it's 3 tiers. For some reason I was picturing the bootleggers as the businesses but it'd be the ad companies in this situation. Would we end up with an advertisement mafia?
Oh right, it's 3 tiers. For some reason I was picturing the bootleggers as the businesses but it'd be the ad companies in this situation. Would we end up with an advertisement mafia?
There's a lot of "society couldn't exist without advertising" reactions in this thread, and... I don't think that's really the case, at least for reasonable definitions of "advertising". There are...
There's a lot of "society couldn't exist without advertising" reactions in this thread, and... I don't think that's really the case, at least for reasonable definitions of "advertising". There are plenty of alternative ways we could do this sort of thing as a society, even without discarding the rest of capitalism.
Imagine, for example, a world where in which you want to buy a chair.
You go consult the big directory of chair vendors, as one does. Anyone who can sell you a chair is listed in this directory. (The same companies might be listed as pencil vendors too, if they happen to sell both chairs and pencils.)
The directory lets you filter by which styles of chairs they sell, price ranges, warranties, whether they're new or used chair vendors or just a person who threw a single chair on craigslist, reviews from previous buyers, whatever support-or-boycott-this-company attributes people care about at the time.
The vendors in the list are randomly sorted by default. You can choose to sort by prices or review scores instead. (You can't sort by name, because there's no good reason to, and it encourages that thing people used to do in the phone book days where companies would list their names starting with "AAAAA" so they'd appear at the start of the list.)
At no point in this process is your attention forcibly diverted toward chair shopping. You are here because you took the explicit step of looking for a chair.
"But @em-dash", you say, "wouldn't that mean there are still like 40 effectively-identical chair vendors left in the list even after applying a normal set of filters? How would they differentiate themselves?"
They would not. If they have a problem with that, perhaps they should try being less identical in ways that matter to chair buyers, instead of spending unreasonable amounts of effort and money making 30-second videos of attractive people enthusiastically sitting in chairs.
If I wanted a chair I'd search the web or pick one out at a furniture store. I don't think an ad has ever actually lead to me buying from someone. Closest I got were the purple mattress...
If I wanted a chair I'd search the web or pick one out at a furniture store. I don't think an ad has ever actually lead to me buying from someone. Closest I got were the purple mattress commercials, but still never bought one. If there were no ads people would just do this.
Personally I feel that completely banning advertising is going too far in the opposite direction. As I understand it there are several parts why it is so prevalent and obnoxious. All ultimately...
Personally I feel that completely banning advertising is going too far in the opposite direction.
As I understand it there are several parts why it is so prevalent and obnoxious. All ultimately having root in either weak regulations or the power balance between average person and the industry:
no strong alternative payment model. This is a big one
no hard upper limit to per person earning potentional. There are limits of course but more amorphous than say direct payment. Also double dipping potential
extremely low general tech literacy enabling hostile on device sw behaviour. If the device someone uses works against their interest, content filtering is suddenly harder. Even if the person knows it is possible
Actual regulation around the content, method of delivery and better general education combined with strong social safety nets would naturaly limit advertising volume. Any one of these would have benefits.
Actual banning would simply let large players use loopholes while also being less realistic in current climate than everyone switching their primary computer to Linux tomorrow.
Well, maybe online. The alternative is pay for what you consume, as many news sites are going the direction of. I agree with more proper regulations. Advertising should not make my webpage take...
no strong alternative payment model. This is a big one
Well, maybe online. The alternative is pay for what you consume, as many news sites are going the direction of.
I agree with more proper regulations. Advertising should not make my webpage take 100x or even 1000x longer to load than normal, and it should not disrupt or even halt my primary consumption. This is trivial with videos by having ads be on the tail end instead of as a midroll, With text, it's a much harder problem.
Something I always think about when I see old magazines is how much less offensive the advertising is. If we went back to that style, most of the issues are gone. If I could regulate things, ads...
Something I always think about when I see old magazines is how much less offensive the advertising is. If we went back to that style, most of the issues are gone.
If I could regulate things, ads would have to be static, silent, and comprised of mostly text. A few images can be allowed for eyecatch and communication purposes.
Depending on how far back you go they get very offensive for very different reasons! I saw a magazine ad that implied if a housewife were to not buy their brand of coffee, their coffee will be so...
Depending on how far back you go they get very offensive for very different reasons! I saw a magazine ad that implied if a housewife were to not buy their brand of coffee, their coffee will be so bad that their husband will leave them. And of course there are so many ads about the health benefits of smoking tobacco. Can’t forget Fred Flintstone smoking.
A little late to the thread but a few thoughts... At first I was excited by the thought experiment. It's not realistic but it's fun to think about. Cheers to an ad free utopia! It would be more...
A little late to the thread but a few thoughts...
At first I was excited by the thought experiment. It's not realistic but it's fun to think about. Cheers to an ad free utopia! It would be more fun to think about if it felt possible of course. Sadly the post didn't make much of a case for viability. How does such a law get passed in spite of legislative capture? How do you convince the public when the mere suggestion of such a law unites companies and markets againt you in a historically unprecedented way? The misinformation and manipulation campaigns aimed at convincing the public the ban is a bad idea would be massive.
Even as an advertiser (especially as an advertiser), I am convinced that outlawing advertising is the best thing we can do for our world now. More than gun control. More than tackling climate change. More than lowering the price of eggs.
My bold, and wow. I agree that it would be good in a lot of ways, but maybe not that good.
Removing these advanced manipulation tools would force everyone—politicians included—to snap back into reality. By outlawing advertising, the machinery of mass delusion would lose its most addictive and toxic fuel.
I'd love to outlaw mass manipulation. But outlawing advertising wouldn't do it. You'd still be able to manipulate people as long as it wasn't tied to selling something. It wouldn't stop people from stoking outrage and fear for clicks and engagement for example. State and corporate level manipulation of public perception and sentiment already ignores laws where convenient. It presumably wouldn't stop companies from paying publications to talk about their product unless the ban extended into journalistic freedom, which is a giant can of worms. There are a lot of ways to advertise without buying an in your face ad.
But if we imagine that advertising being illegal would cause social media platforms to quickly collapse, then that would at least decrease mass manipulation. Except we know that wouldn't happen short to medium term, they'd spend virtually unlimited funds coming up with new monetization strategies and looking for loopholes in the new advertising ban. They'd file lawsuits, they'd pay PR firms to sway public opinion, they'd increase investment in markets where advertising wasn't banned (or is this global?).
Maybe worst of all, they'd look for new ways to monetize user data. Selling people's private lives isn't advertising. And investors would let them carry on, for quite a long time, even if they struggled a bit. Tech companies failing to turn a profit with promises of future returns is business as usual. And users, and the data they generate, is a big part of the valuation of these companies. Our ad free utopia wouldn't be a social media free utopia.
And so manipulation wouldn't go away, but it's still fun to think about the implications of an ad free world. The really interesting question is what would you replace it with? How do new businesses connect with their target market? How do you educate consumers about a market you're trying to invent? Without some sort of discovery you'd end up entrenching existing brands (which already have name recognition) and stifling competition. Those big brands would still be able to interact with customers during and after a sale, making them far better platforms for launching new products than anyone else would have. So an advertising ban would have the side effect of massively increasing the value and power of existing brands by making branding itself a scarcer resource.
No doubt we'd come up with alternative options but I was disappointed that the post didn't explore the all important question of what comes after the ban.
I personally agree with some others in this thread: Stronger regulation is the answer. Certain types of advertising (like pharma) should be illegal or highly restricted. We should remove the grey area around certain dark patterns in advertising and just make them illegal. Get rid of billboards (as some suggested) and other forms of intrusive advertising. Further restrict what can be advertised where children are likely to see it.
I think there a lot of solutions that could realistically happen, if not in the US at the moment.
Wild idea that I just had: What if there was a platform exclusively designed for advertising? What if all advertisement was legally forced to remain on such platforms? I’m imagining a TikTok but...
Wild idea that I just had: What if there was a platform exclusively designed for advertising? What if all advertisement was legally forced to remain on such platforms? I’m imagining a TikTok but exclusively for companies (not individuals) to advertise stuff. You go on there, start swiping, and interact with the ads that matter to you, which in turn trains your algorithm to show you more of that. Then we could get rid of ads everywhere else and go to those platforms to find the products and services that we care about when we want to.
Can we at least change promotional and marketing emails to opt-in rather than "if you don't click this button we can send you crap" please? I got tasked with cleaning up my grandparents' email...
Can we at least change promotional and marketing emails to opt-in rather than "if you don't click this button we can send you crap" please?
I got tasked with cleaning up my grandparents' email that has EIGHTY GODDAMNED THOUSAND PROMOTIONAL EMAILS from HUNDREDS OF PLACES that I have to unsubscribe from....
Small tip with massive impact on your Inbox: For years, I had a filter to move anything that had the word “Unsubscribe” in the body of the email to Spam. It may be dangerous to them, perhaps, but...
Small tip with massive impact on your Inbox: For years, I had a filter to move anything that had the word “Unsubscribe” in the body of the email to Spam. It may be dangerous to them, perhaps, but I find that less than 1% of what goes there is something I needed to pay attention to.
There are some aspects of this I am not sure about. Particularly reviews. For professional reviews, are companies still allowed to seed review units to the press? Are companies even allowed to...
There are some aspects of this I am not sure about. Particularly reviews. For professional reviews, are companies still allowed to seed review units to the press? Are companies even allowed to invite the press to release events? Wouldn’t any articles coming from those events be considered paid advertising? Professional reviews are still objectively a good thing.
Also advertising does still fill the role of informing the consumer. I have found some good services from Theo’s and Fireship’s YouTube channels. LTT vets their sponsors pretty well, so they are also a useful source of information. Many open source frameworks and libraries have sponsored links to other software that it works well with. Recently, I bought the Ozlo sleep buds from an LTT sponsored video and the WAN show follow up. I have had them for months now, and am incredibly happy with them. Without that ad, I would absolutely not even know about them.
That being said, I am absolutely happy with throwing out that baby with the disgusting bath water that is advertising.
As someone who has given this way too much thought: The line to be drawn is essentially "The targeted audience must opt-in, and not be rewarded or punished for their decision." So some banned...
As someone who has given this way too much thought:
The line to be drawn is essentially "The targeted audience must opt-in, and not be rewarded or punished for their decision."
So some banned activities:
Movie trailers before the feature
Outdoor billboards
Coupons
Pop-ups
Referral bonuses
Sponsored promotion in stores from manufacturers
Some permitted activities:
Movie trailers after the movie.
Tasteful, impersonal sponsors at the bottom/end of a page.
Store signage.
Email newsletters (without discounts)
Trade shows.
Reviewers.
Stores offering discounts to move their inventory.
Because you can walk out when the movie is over, but you can't see behind a billboard. There would need to be some strict rules regarding reviewer integrity, as that's the blurriest line.
Broadcast TV/Radio would be the hardest to limit, but I think falls roughly under the "after content" pattern: A strictly regimented 3-6 minute window per half/full hour, no breaking content for ads.
I think this is a very good framework. It would be difficult to regulate; I think we would need an entire new regulatory body. But it’s still a very good framework. What do you mean by the target...
I think this is a very good framework. It would be difficult to regulate; I think we would need an entire new regulatory body. But it’s still a very good framework.
What do you mean by the target group needing to be opt in? All advertising is targeted advertising. If you don’t believe me, take a trip to the Bay Area. San Francisco, Oakland, Palo Alto, etc. Most of their billboards are tech things that you likely haven’t heard of.
So now do we have to opt in to advertising at a movie? On the documentation page for a software library? It feels like it’s going to be the GDPR cookie notice all over again.
Some level of targeting needs to happen, and I don’t think it’s tenable to mark all advertising opt in.
So my idea there boils down to: The advertising is not required in order to view the content, in a consistent manner. By forcing ads to be tacked on at the end, opposed to before or intermingled,...
So now do we have to opt in to advertising at a movie? On the documentation page for a software library?
So my idea there boils down to: The advertising is not required in order to view the content, in a consistent manner. By forcing ads to be tacked on at the end, opposed to before or intermingled, the opt-in is achieved by giving the user to avoid them completely. Billboards would be banned, as there is no way to reasonably provide that same level of mechanism.
All advertising is targeted advertising.
I made that somewhat broad on purpose. However, @shu gave a great example; if I'm in the market for mattresses, I should be able to opt-in to that specifically, rather than a data analysis company spying on me to try to figure out that I'm in that market. And when I opt-out, that method is gone.
I'm envisioning some level of centralized marketing body which provides that service, which provides a universal but private mechanism (ala an anonymous opt-out flag in a browser enforced by law) which allows marketers to provide that opt-in targeting, while not requiring the terrible experience of the cookie notice.
Yeah, ads could actually become useful, if we could freely decide to receive them, like a temporary subscription for specific product ranges. We'd get actual product information, and not deceiving...
"The targetted audience must opt-in, and not be rewarded or punished for their decision."
Yeah, ads could actually become useful, if we could freely decide to receive them, like a temporary subscription for specific product ranges. We'd get actual product information, and not deceiving manipulative marketing that's mainly created to grab our attention.
Yes. Note that there isn't a current ban on advertising. I'm not saying that this is what you're doing - your comment is very brief - but people are often critiqued for taking part in systems that...
Yes. Note that there isn't a current ban on advertising.
I'm not saying that this is what you're doing - your comment is very brief - but people are often critiqued for taking part in systems that they are questioning or advocating against. Unfortunately the reality is that unless we abolish the systems that we exist within completely, we still have to live within them. You can't just stop advertising yourself even if you think advertising shouldn't exist, because there's no other system in place for you to use to do things like drive traffic or sell.
I think a world without advertising would be so obviously better than the world we are in now that I don't know why we aren't trying to figure it out. I often think of it idly, and it's easy to...
I think a world without advertising would be so obviously better than the world we are in now that I don't know why we aren't trying to figure it out. I often think of it idly, and it's easy to raise the objection "but what is advertising? where do you draw the line?" But that's true of a lot of things, and if we're truly determined to reject the money that comes from advertising business, we can figure it out. Or we could get part of the way there, and still have made life much better for virtually everyone.
On a different note, one thought I had for a definition of advertising was something like "paid promotion". Basically, attack the money - it makes for a very bright line. But I wonder would we then see illegal advertising (basically people being bribed to advertise)? Would we still see completely free promotion by "advertisers"? Weird sorts of in-kind payments to try and get around laws? I'm curious what kind of a hydra it would be.
I suspect you’d have to be a lot more specific than simply going after the money directly. “No sir he’s not buying advertising, he’s not allowed to. He’s just buying FaceBux virtual credits which...
I suspect you’d have to be a lot more specific than simply going after the money directly.
“No sir he’s not buying advertising, he’s not allowed to. He’s just buying FaceBux virtual credits which you can use to play games or trade for stuff via Facebook Marketplace. Oh yes and boost your post to be higher in the algorithm but that’s separate, there’s no money involved at that stage of the process”
“No sir it’s not a paid review, that would be illegal. We just sent 20 of our flagship phone to make absolutely sure we didn’t accidentally send a dodgy one for his review. What’s that, you’re saying he sold the other 19 phones on the secondhand market and made a bunch of money? Good for him I’m glad he found a use for all those phones and they didn’t become e-waste!”
Another aspect of making ads illegal is limiting consumerism. Western societies consume so much more than they really need, and that won't work for much longer, especially because non-western...
Another aspect of making ads illegal is limiting consumerism. Western societies consume so much more than they really need, and that won't work for much longer, especially because non-western societies are catching up. If we keep consuming at this pace, we'll crash hard in a few generations even if we somehow manage to mitigate climate change. There are only so much resources our little planet has to offer.
I think one good alternative is to allow the end users to buy/crowdfund advertising for non-commercial uses, especially in a pool that can be used across several advertising spots. Google used to...
I think one good alternative is to allow the end users to buy/crowdfund advertising for non-commercial uses, especially in a pool that can be used across several advertising spots.
Google used to have Contributor v1 where you add your own bid to display anything you want if you win. Still, unlike ad blockers Google still receive, store and use your visit history to serve ads. It still needs to display something in the ads space where adblockers tidy up the space. It is also not 100% of the time you will win, even with high monthly budget. It was available for very limited number of countries before it was discontinued.
There was Scroll, who implemented ads-free subscription for several news websites (it does not include paywall bypass). Twitter acquired it and rolled it into a part of Twitter Blue. Elon killed it when Blue become X Premium.
There was a time people crowdfunded to buy skytrain ads for art. They raised 2 million baht (~$60k US), and I heard they covered 2 trains for 2 weeks where every single physical ads spot inside and outside (not including the TV) become art display.
Another way to think about it is that we invest, as a society, about 1-2% (IIRC from what I've read in the past) of our resources & workforce to advertising. Isn't there something better we can do...
Another way to think about it is that we invest, as a society, about 1-2% (IIRC from what I've read in the past) of our resources & workforce to advertising. Isn't there something better we can do with that capital and these people ? To note ads are effectively paid for by a sort of VAT tax on products we buy, so it's predominantly paid by low-middle class, although you can somewhat avoid it if you buy no-brand products.
How about: "Banning any and all forms of advertising used with the purpose of inducing hyperconsumerism in any audience." That way, advertising can still have a space to exist; but now it can't do...
How about: "Banning any and all forms of advertising used with the purpose of inducing hyperconsumerism in any audience."
That way, advertising can still have a space to exist; but now it can't do things like suggest that people can achieve a desirable lifestyle but only if they drink smoothie-chain's 1000 calorie smoothies. The local secondhand store can still at least advertise that they exist, are real, and are at x address.
I'd be ok with "Banning unethical advertisement". Then defining that. Unethical ads would be those that mislead/manipulate (which includes what you said, using personal info, political mud...
I'd be ok with "Banning unethical advertisement". Then defining that.
Unethical ads would be those that mislead/manipulate (which includes what you said, using personal info, political mud slinging, etc...), harass (popups, sound, self playing videos, etc...) or trick (fake games, fake articles - including: fake article ads, the article themselves designed to show ads with content copied from elsewhere or AI generated (think "slideshows" articles & those abominations that have ads every other paragraph).
That would lead to a lot of court cases. People don't just shrug their shoulders and say oh, I just won't now. Litigation based on intent to do something that abstract would be a pain.
That would lead to a lot of court cases. People don't just shrug their shoulders and say oh, I just won't now.
Litigation based on intent to do something that abstract would be a pain.
I think the end of advertising would make it harder for new brands to establish. Whatever the top brands are now would remain indefinitely in that position.
I think the end of advertising would make it harder for new brands to establish. Whatever the top brands are now would remain indefinitely in that position.
Dang. I would love that. Imagine an economy that doesn’t run on ads and subscriptions.
Edit:
This.
I despise advertising with every fiber of my being, but I think part of it is how "in your face" modern advertising is. Reality is, some advertising always needs to be allowed. New businesses, especially smaller businesses, need a way to reach out and put the word out about what they are selling and why it's good for the consumer.
I've always imagined my ideal "advertising" remedy to fix the absolutely obnoxious state it currently is in would be something akin to a dedicated government run online repository or something. Something where you can go to the site, look up the type of products you're looking for, and then have options populate based on that.
Obviously it's not perfect and there's sooooo many logistical issues that would come with that, but it would get rid of the "in your face" advertising we currently have, and would at least put things back into the hands of consumers so they get to choose when they want to be advertised to in a sense.
This is, as so many problems of modern societies, a problem of not enough regulation
Properly regulated advertisement is necessary in societies with so many interconnected people. We need mass communication in many forms, and doing a hatchet job of banning some types of mass-communication is not a good idea.
But banning unlimited spending on political campaigns, restricting advertising, restricting hate speech, restricting "bullying speech" or other systematic campaigns aimed at ruining individual people's lives, and many other areas of society simply need more regulation because we're not in the early 1900s any longer.
I think you described the “yellow pages” lol, but I agree, and I would totally want something like that myself, just a directory with all businesses, sorted by category, and then I can look up the link to their website and/or contact information.
Honestly I was basically thinking of it as akin to Yellow Pages, but digital haha. It just seems like it would be a way better system if it could be properly implemented. I just doubt the logistics would be feasible.
I also was about to reply “I believe you are describing the internet of the early 1999-2000s.”
Before end-game SEO. I’m sure it always had some manipulation of who got to the top of results, but it was not the shit show we have now.
One of the functions of advertising is to make you aware of the concept of a product that you may not know existed or a vocabulary for thinking/talking about a problem to be solved with a product that you wouldn’t have if you’re not aware of the field. If I had never heard of Yaupon, how would I ever think to look for it? Or if what I want is a way to listen to music what am I gonna search for? Record player? Tape deck? Smart speaker? Sonos? “Thing that plays music out loud through one of those boxes?”
What you’re proposing would require the government to come up with some sort of data model to categorize the whole galaxy of stuff out there so it’s searchable and indexable. A galaxy of stuff that is constantly growing and changing and recategorizing itself at that.
Then there’s the problem where even if I know exactly what I want to the point where I could draw a picture of it, I might not actually know what it’s called. Like I am constantly at a loss about how to buy replacement parts for random things in my house because “long plastic thing with a t-shaped hook on it that curves forwards and unlatches a hook to eject the water filter from my [make and model number] refrigerator,” surprisingly, still doesn’t turn up much when I put it into Google with a lot of additional sleuthing.
I don't think you realistically can have capitalism without advertising.
It's illegal to advertise, but what if I tell people about a thing I bought. That can't be illegal. But what if I'm connected or famous in a way that lets me reach a bunch of people? Maybe it's illegal to be a spokesman or get paid to talk about a product. But what if my brother owns the company and I tell everyone about it just because I want him to do well.
Something does turn up if I punch that into ChatGPT. Maybe that’s the way to do it.
Wait, ChatGPT has part diagrams!? That'll make looking up replacement parts a lot easier. I usually have to search the web and pray someone uploaded the diagram. Q_Q
Oh, no. I didn’t say that. I meant that something like ChatGPT could be developed that does enable you to find parts by just describing them. I mean, shouldn’t Google Gemini be able to do that now?
My go-to move is to just search for [make, model] parts diagram and try to find the thing. The problem is every website that does this stuff is so loaded down with garbage that they’re basically unusable, and often the PDFs of the diagrams are so low rez they’re illegible.
What ought to be the industry standard convention now is to have a universal wiki of appliance documentation and every appliance produced has a QR code stamped somewhere visible that I can scan and access them for parts diagrams, schematics, etc. (And for electronics, links to firmware as well). Stop making me look for serial numbers and shit.
I'm going to add a repair wiki to my list of things that we should have..... Oh neat, it exists, but it's rather sparse: repair.wiki - now if every company added their products to it and did the QR code thing we'd be golden. Down side being that many companies don't want us repairing things.
This is the last thread I expected to suddenly find something I have to buy. Had never heard of Yaupon before, thanks for the info! 😁
Guess I'm a case of why ads are needed, but at the same time I've never seen a Yaupon ad so the wrong ads are out there. At this point I use a blocker, unconsciously bat ads away and mentally blacklist, and sometimes actively deter people from, companies that pay for scummy ads (popups, flashing lights, fake articles, fake games, telemarketers, etc...). So imo it's bad PR to get them and those "immoral" ad types should exist.
Like I said, logistically I don't think it would ever work. It's more of a "in a perfect world, this would be my ideal".
If logistics aren't an issue, I would imagine the search function would also have built in capabilities to ask more long-form questions to get ideas for stuff, or even categories like "I'd like to try out a new tea, I like these properties" and then it would pull up stuff from there.
Once again stressing the point that I know this is not logistically feasible, it's just my ideal in a perfect world.
I've never felt so seen
I'm going to say, no. Unpopular opinion 'round here, I imagine, but I love advertising. . . in the right place, in the right measure. Produced with some creativity. Take all the bills you see posted around NYC. They're sophisticated, and they make me feel glamorous for standing in NY looking at them. It's part of the experience for me.
Advertising is very natural. The birds do it, the bees do it, and man around this time of year, do the plants ever do it! (Ahhhh-chooo!). All advertising really is a form of communication about who we are and where to find us.
That's not to say there is isn't excessive advertsing that shouldn't be rolled back. Commercial breaks in live media are too long and too frequent and perhaps worst of all, too repetitive. There should be some serious guidelines around advertising that involves the public interest. Think political campaigns, ad campaigns by BP about global warming, etc etc. And there should be constraints in all advertising about what can be said and how.
Even if we all agreed that "advertising" should go, it would be an impossible task. What even is advertising? Some advertising is involuntary or negative, and also still useful. You ever sat next to someone needing a shower on the bus? (I know the article says paid, third-party advertising. But what about classifieds? That's third party at least, also paid in many cases. Movie trailers? Church posters? Rock show flyers on the telephone pole?)
So no, lets not ditch advertising. Let's shape it instead to make our lives more colorful and useful.
Birds would create SEO click farms in India if it would help them bang other birds. Just because something is "natural" doesn't mean it can't be perverted and ruined by greed and excessiveness.
There is no way to have advertising not be an arms race to the worst possible version of itself without heavily regulating and limiting it which would be, by its very nature, impossible to do properly.
We don't get catchy jingles on the radio anymore, we get AI generated rage porn sifted untraceably into our algorithmically managed feeds. There's no putting that genie back in the bottle without a lot of work.
I had half a comment written and realised it was probably too sarcastic which doesn’t actually serve anyone’s interests here.
Anyway, I strongly suspect if advertising platforms were held accountable for the contents of their ads, every single one, then advertising platforms would start moderating their ads and that would go a long way to making ads more expensive and also less likely to be shitty.
I imagine if Facebook was held liable for promoting every ad that it held, and couldn’t hide behind “but we’re too big, we didn’t know, we can’t be held responsible because we’re just hosting someone else’s ads” they would pretty quickly moderate the ads that go on their platform.
Sure it’s not a perfect solution, but regulation doesn’t need to be perfect, it just needs to set up the right combination of incentives to generally result in behaviour that benefits society.
The issue, like with so many regulations, is again that this hurts small and new businesses the most while large corporations will easily adapt. That's bad for everyone, small businesses are good (and honestly necessary) for local economies, bring innovation and competition.
I only have experience with selling small numbers of "luxury" products (loudspeakers for about 1k USD with tax, so nothing super expensive, but not something that you really need), but in that area even with todays costs it's not uncommon that in the very beginning, when you're lowest on cash, if you don't get very lucky with word of mouth you spend 800 USD on advertising to sell one 1k product, covering only material costs (which are often higher at the beginning, before manufacturing larger batches). Until the advertising snowballs a tiny bit, you just work for free and hope for the best.
At this moment, it is still often possible to start a tiny business with very little cash if you do it smart, and grow from there. But most of them still fail and most people still never even try. We should think really hard whether any regulations that would increase this hurdle are worth it.
Regulations don't have to be one size fits all though. Like if you're spending under 100k a year on advertisements, that could just be unregulated, and you only start regulating once you start spending more.
I don't know shit about advertising, but it doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem to regulate advertising without hurting smaller businesses.
So in addition to regulation, large corporations should be taxed waaaaaay more to make it more competetive for small companies.
That's the funniest line I've read all week.
The arms race comparison is pretty apt. Even if 99% of advertisers were to suddently be chill and keep things clever and respectful, all it takes is that last 1% who blasts low-quality bs into everyone's faces to see some sort of success before everyone else realizes that if they don't do the same thing, they're toast. Seems like a larger problem endemic to the competition and the cut-throat nature of our economic systems.
The "but everything is advertising" arguement is such a cop-out that it honestly makes me upset.
Are birds telling you to bug your doctors to get you branded drugs? Are the plants persuading you to vote fascists into public office? Are the birds and bees looking to establish unhealthy habits that hurt the populace in order for them to make more profits? Is the stinky person on the bus actually trying to do something by being stinky?
Clearly, this "abolish advertising" is just wishful thinking. There is no plan and no definitive delineation about what counts as an advertisement or anything like that. So I think it's fair to assume they aren't trying to create an authoritarian state where anything and everything can be banned and excised from society.
Yes, advertisements can be beautiful. Here's an entire movie based on mascots designed to sell beer. But does that look anything like the majority of advertisements you see? No, not even close. Advertisements are designed to steal your attention. And yes, I do mean steal; they distract you from other things by design. TV literally interrupts the show to show you the ads! YouTube will serve you an ad mid-sentence! Radio is full of ads with yelling people speaking at lightspeed!
Would you feel less glamorous if those ads you see in NYC were replaced with art for art's sake? Seriously, why do you think it's better to have advertising there? Do you feel empowered by the ability to spend money?
Maybe ads would be OK if they were opt-in, or at the very least actually relevant to the things I'm looking at. If I am to see a movie trailer, maybe it should be when I'm looking through a directory of movies or film reviews. You know, the reason we call them trailers is because they would play after watching another movie, right? But heck, I wouldn't really be too upset seeing them play before the movie, assuming the theaters would tell me the time the movie I paid for actually starts at.
But as things are, advertisements have measurably negative effects on society, and the people making them are getting away with it because nothing they are doing is illegal. That's bullshit. Worse yet is it's effect on children. Kids under a certain age can't even tell some things are advertisements, and older kids can't tell what claims advertisements make that are bullshit (and frankly, most will probably never recognize all of it). Advertisement in it's current form causes harm, full stop.
But I guess I'm basically agreeing with your last point. Lets shape advertisement to make our lives more colorful and useful. But we have to start with legislating restrictions to what kind of advertisements are acceptable. Like the article says, the advertisers are not going to regulate themselves.
Imagine these as seasonally changing art installations with messaging that isn't bound to specific brands. Imagine we could use this public space for wonder and amazement, or just joy or visual toys or science or for works that make us think or connect with other people without trying to manipulate us into spending money for things we don't need.
Wouldn't that be much more glamorous than a shoddy CocaCola-ad?
The bills in nyc usually only advertise entertainment and fashion, so while commercial mostly, it is kind of an art display.
It would, but that's so far in the realm of fantasy and "if only everyone would just" reasoning that it's not really worth discussing. Compromises like mandatory style guidelines for advertisements pushed by individual cities (or even city districts) are something that actually has a chance of happening.
Yeah, it is a fantasy, but it's the topic of this thread. 🙂
Goddamn, this some Don Draper shit right here.
This comment is beautifully written, observant, thoughtful, and funny. I'm disappointed to see multiple replies that are hostile and unfair. You acknowledge some downsides and excesses of advertising and point out a non-obvious upside of advertising (beauty, glamour, creativity).
If you want to have a complex, nuanced perspective on advertising, you need to find a way to integrate both the downsides and the upsides into your perspective. I'm really tired of black-and-white thinking on topics related to economics, politics, policy, tech, and social change. I don't know why some people have chosen to be so combative toward this comment in particular.
Despite the disagreements in the comments on this post, there seems to be a lot of agreement that some new regulations of advertising would be a good idea. A more constructive path for the conversation to follow: what specific regulations would improve things?
i really appreciate the validation. I was proud of how it came out. now if only I could write like this for my old testament class.
At the bare minimum, the USA needs to stop advertising prescriptions. Your doctor should recommend medicine to you. Not the other way around.
Placement of ads, length, etc all should be regulated, as another user points out.
The advertising of medication and legal services is one of the biggest failures of the supreme court. There's a case referenced in better call saul that I can't recall at the moment which was basically the landmark case that lead to the billboards and ads we get today for these sharks.
My small business, which uses very tasteful but necessary advertising (small niche publishing), would go under in an instant.
That said, I understand the plight. It would be so easy for us to just plaster our website and publication with ads, but we have to fight temptations.
Adding to this.
I hate advertising, but after having some experience with starting a tiny startup there is no way I could do without it, as it exists now. Getting people to even know that our product exists was by far the most difficult thing for us.
It feels like almost all of the people in this thread have no idea how hard this is in most situations when you're starting out. I think people don't fully realize that so many potential regulations that would work against overgrown corporations which piss everyone off would hurt small businesses even more, which goes against all of our interests, and quite often there's no realistic (let alone fair) way to discern between those two groups.
If you want to know what it looks like to not have advertising shoved into your face at every moment, just take a virtual drive along Hawaii's roadways where billboards have been banned for over a century.
São Paulo, Alaska, Hawaii, and Vermont are great examples of taming visual pollution. That's a great aspect of it, though I'm convinced the most insidious real estate from advertising is occupied in our pockets and in our minds.
Maine too!
It's a stark difference going on a drive through New Hampshire vs Vermont.
We also did this in Czechia around highways and "first class" roads (90 km/h speed limit, usually just one lane in each direction but expected highish traffic), which is much easier to push through than something like regulating advertisements within cities since there's a very clear issue with firstly billboards being designed to take away your attention while you drive and secondly with them being a big hazard when an accident does happen and a car hits a billboard pole - at highway speeds that's usually a death sentence.
During that whole ordeal we realized that some billboard companies are a literal mafia, operating semi-illegally, beating up or threatening anti-billboard activists or even competitors etc. So it took a years long fight (law applies since 2017), but nowadays it's finally done and it's great. Google maps probably won't have it on street view yet.
A great thing is that it brought the issue of the billboard lobby and mafia-like practices to the public, so it increased the number of anti-advertisement activists and made politicians and bureaucrats finally care a bit. Because the issue is that we do actually have some laws that regulate advertisement in public spaces, nothing radical, but there are rules, however neither side gave a shit about them and now they're being forced to, so far only in some places. So the activists don't even need to be radical either, they just push people to do their jobs and enforce laws, which is great because our society usually does not respect too activisty-looking activists but these ones nobody minds.
There has also been some push for local advertisement manuals prescribing things like color schemes and maximum sizes that apply around certain areas (typically historical centers of cities), which can reduce a lot of the visually ugliest and most aggressive stuff and applies even to things like branded restaurant parasols (no branding over xx size and only one allowed color for example) etc. I think this is a great compromise.
And Vermont -- I love not seeing billboards, but as soon as I cross into NY I'm bombarded with them, often for VT businesses.
I am not sure if it was ever valid. If you see very old advertisements in newspapers from well over a century ago you also see all sorts of wild claims and promises that can't possibly be true.
Anyway, I do like the thought experiment. I am not sure if it is possible to do it to the degree proposed in the blogpost. Simply because there is no hard line where you can say “yes this is advertising” and where it is organic mouth-to-mouth. But, it certainly seems possible to me to reign in advertising a lot.
It would require a massive shift in society though.
If I were to play devil's advocate the "providers consumers with necessary information" can be as simple as the advertisement showing that the product exists. Back in Texas I recall seeing advertisements for the iPhone that had literally no information about it other than the name and a picture of the phone. If someone saw the advertisement and noticed that the number after the name had changed, that'd be "necessary information" for a consumer that uses and wants to update to the latest version. No specs, no changes from the previous version, just "iPhone +1"
That's still BS, there's much better ways to do consumer information. There's magazines/TV shows/youtubers that do that very well, with somewhat objective comparative reviews, safety/durability/taste tests, etc. This is superior to advertising in every way imo. We can have some canals for companies to provide information to people that needs it (e.g. catalogues, website, etc.) but it doesn't need to be in your face.
Many weren't, like the classic snake oil salesman, and some were even harmful like Radium Water.
On top of the "how do you define that?" and "how do you get information out about products?" questions other comments bring up, you're gonna need to either find an alternative way to sustain the vast majority of the Web or lock it off from anyone who can't pay directly for every page they read/video they watch/game they play.
That's why I think a better solution is to make ads less intrusive, rather than doing away with them entirely. Ads are fine if they don't bloat the webpage and aren't flashing casino light at you on the side of your limited real estate as you read.
we may need alternative means regardless, given that even those ads aren't paying the bills for more and more sites. They are sort of leaning towards subscription paywalls for that. It's sadly the only logical means without subsidies or simply figuring out how to make society cheaper to survive in.
Targeted bans make sense. Sure lets get ads out of politics, lets get billboards off buildings and drives, lets get rid of "3rd party" reviews.
A "ban on advertising" though is so vague and general as to be either pointless or dangerous. You just have people shift what the definition of "advertising" is, because what is a speech about something you like?, and then you wind up with some committee to enforce what is or isn't advertising, and suddenly you've got Trump and Elon out there who magically aren't while everyone who disagrees with them is.
Like many of these things, it feels like a 101 level of "WOULDN'T THIS BE REVOLUTIONARY! ITS BECAUSE MEAN PEOPLE WON'T ALLOW IT", which like, yes that is in fact a part of it, but there's lots of other reasons these things are the way they are. Plenty of people have spent their lives looking into and trying to fix/adjust these things. We had MUCH stronger laws targeting children before the internet, which let companies take a second stab at "hey look what's wrong with Joe Camel though?", and they mostly got away with it.
Part of the reason they got away with it is because of technical illiteracy and money in politics going to those who'd back them, but another is a lot of people saying "oh yeah freedom of speech", because advertising and "moral code" style laws were frowned upon as religious right nonsense only. Which, yes it was, but also there are reasonable lines.
So in short, this really doesn't feel like it's bringing anything new to the real conversation around this. It's straw man arguments for the opposition (i'm willing to bet I could find several examples of advertising they would consider free speech, especially when they bring up propaganda) or naive/hopeful stuff from their side.
I'm not against people wanting to make things better, but I get annoyed when it reads like the sports fan who's certain if they were the coach their team would've won, having never even played the damn game and can't even quote you half the real rules.
I'm just going to say that Dorothy Sayers classic mystery story Murder Must Advertise already features many problems with advertising in the 1920s.
Also, making forms of speech and trade illegal was tried by Communist regimes and it led to black markets and abuse.
But regulation of time, place and manner could work for large advertising campaigns I think. We could create advertising free zones for our sanity.
For ads tho? I cant picture that.
No one wants it/ needs it now.
Banksy
People get creative. It might look like graffiti tagging. It might look like email spam or phone scams that are sourced in another country. I'm confident that means and methods we have never thought of would be found and tried.
If you read about prohibition, people found and distributed booze.
Oh dang, yeah, now that you pointed out graffiti and spam I can see it now. It'd be like viagra spam or those car warranty phone calls, paying randos to paint coca cola bottles on walls "not our fault some hooligan likes our product".
Booze might not be the best example, the target audience actually wanted booze. I doubt they could do much with how many actually want ads.
But the merchants, the businesses are the purchasers of ads. They want them.
Oh right, it's 3 tiers. For some reason I was picturing the bootleggers as the businesses but it'd be the ad companies in this situation. Would we end up with an advertisement mafia?
We might.
There's a lot of "society couldn't exist without advertising" reactions in this thread, and... I don't think that's really the case, at least for reasonable definitions of "advertising". There are plenty of alternative ways we could do this sort of thing as a society, even without discarding the rest of capitalism.
Imagine, for example, a world where in which you want to buy a chair.
You go consult the big directory of chair vendors, as one does. Anyone who can sell you a chair is listed in this directory. (The same companies might be listed as pencil vendors too, if they happen to sell both chairs and pencils.)
The directory lets you filter by which styles of chairs they sell, price ranges, warranties, whether they're new or used chair vendors or just a person who threw a single chair on craigslist, reviews from previous buyers, whatever support-or-boycott-this-company attributes people care about at the time.
The vendors in the list are randomly sorted by default. You can choose to sort by prices or review scores instead. (You can't sort by name, because there's no good reason to, and it encourages that thing people used to do in the phone book days where companies would list their names starting with "AAAAA" so they'd appear at the start of the list.)
At no point in this process is your attention forcibly diverted toward chair shopping. You are here because you took the explicit step of looking for a chair.
"But @em-dash", you say, "wouldn't that mean there are still like 40 effectively-identical chair vendors left in the list even after applying a normal set of filters? How would they differentiate themselves?"
They would not. If they have a problem with that, perhaps they should try being less identical in ways that matter to chair buyers, instead of spending unreasonable amounts of effort and money making 30-second videos of attractive people enthusiastically sitting in chairs.
If I wanted a chair I'd search the web or pick one out at a furniture store. I don't think an ad has ever actually lead to me buying from someone. Closest I got were the purple mattress commercials, but still never bought one. If there were no ads people would just do this.
Personally I feel that completely banning advertising is going too far in the opposite direction.
As I understand it there are several parts why it is so prevalent and obnoxious. All ultimately having root in either weak regulations or the power balance between average person and the industry:
Actual regulation around the content, method of delivery and better general education combined with strong social safety nets would naturaly limit advertising volume. Any one of these would have benefits.
Actual banning would simply let large players use loopholes while also being less realistic in current climate than everyone switching their primary computer to Linux tomorrow.
Well, maybe online. The alternative is pay for what you consume, as many news sites are going the direction of.
I agree with more proper regulations. Advertising should not make my webpage take 100x or even 1000x longer to load than normal, and it should not disrupt or even halt my primary consumption. This is trivial with videos by having ads be on the tail end instead of as a midroll, With text, it's a much harder problem.
With text the edges/header/footer have been fine. Mid article, flashing, videos, sounds, popups, fake articles/games are all bad.
Something I always think about when I see old magazines is how much less offensive the advertising is. If we went back to that style, most of the issues are gone.
If I could regulate things, ads would have to be static, silent, and comprised of mostly text. A few images can be allowed for eyecatch and communication purposes.
Depending on how far back you go they get very offensive for very different reasons! I saw a magazine ad that implied if a housewife were to not buy their brand of coffee, their coffee will be so bad that their husband will leave them. And of course there are so many ads about the health benefits of smoking tobacco. Can’t forget Fred Flintstone smoking.
I mean, that was broadly socially acceptable at the time, it's just that society was more terrible for anybody not a white male.
A little late to the thread but a few thoughts...
At first I was excited by the thought experiment. It's not realistic but it's fun to think about. Cheers to an ad free utopia! It would be more fun to think about if it felt possible of course. Sadly the post didn't make much of a case for viability. How does such a law get passed in spite of legislative capture? How do you convince the public when the mere suggestion of such a law unites companies and markets againt you in a historically unprecedented way? The misinformation and manipulation campaigns aimed at convincing the public the ban is a bad idea would be massive.
My bold, and wow. I agree that it would be good in a lot of ways, but maybe not that good.
I'd love to outlaw mass manipulation. But outlawing advertising wouldn't do it. You'd still be able to manipulate people as long as it wasn't tied to selling something. It wouldn't stop people from stoking outrage and fear for clicks and engagement for example. State and corporate level manipulation of public perception and sentiment already ignores laws where convenient. It presumably wouldn't stop companies from paying publications to talk about their product unless the ban extended into journalistic freedom, which is a giant can of worms. There are a lot of ways to advertise without buying an in your face ad.
But if we imagine that advertising being illegal would cause social media platforms to quickly collapse, then that would at least decrease mass manipulation. Except we know that wouldn't happen short to medium term, they'd spend virtually unlimited funds coming up with new monetization strategies and looking for loopholes in the new advertising ban. They'd file lawsuits, they'd pay PR firms to sway public opinion, they'd increase investment in markets where advertising wasn't banned (or is this global?).
Maybe worst of all, they'd look for new ways to monetize user data. Selling people's private lives isn't advertising. And investors would let them carry on, for quite a long time, even if they struggled a bit. Tech companies failing to turn a profit with promises of future returns is business as usual. And users, and the data they generate, is a big part of the valuation of these companies. Our ad free utopia wouldn't be a social media free utopia.
And so manipulation wouldn't go away, but it's still fun to think about the implications of an ad free world. The really interesting question is what would you replace it with? How do new businesses connect with their target market? How do you educate consumers about a market you're trying to invent? Without some sort of discovery you'd end up entrenching existing brands (which already have name recognition) and stifling competition. Those big brands would still be able to interact with customers during and after a sale, making them far better platforms for launching new products than anyone else would have. So an advertising ban would have the side effect of massively increasing the value and power of existing brands by making branding itself a scarcer resource.
No doubt we'd come up with alternative options but I was disappointed that the post didn't explore the all important question of what comes after the ban.
I personally agree with some others in this thread: Stronger regulation is the answer. Certain types of advertising (like pharma) should be illegal or highly restricted. We should remove the grey area around certain dark patterns in advertising and just make them illegal. Get rid of billboards (as some suggested) and other forms of intrusive advertising. Further restrict what can be advertised where children are likely to see it.
I think there a lot of solutions that could realistically happen, if not in the US at the moment.
Wild idea that I just had: What if there was a platform exclusively designed for advertising? What if all advertisement was legally forced to remain on such platforms? I’m imagining a TikTok but exclusively for companies (not individuals) to advertise stuff. You go on there, start swiping, and interact with the ads that matter to you, which in turn trains your algorithm to show you more of that. Then we could get rid of ads everywhere else and go to those platforms to find the products and services that we care about when we want to.
Sound like the shopping channel, but for the internet.
Can we at least change promotional and marketing emails to opt-in rather than "if you don't click this button we can send you crap" please?
I got tasked with cleaning up my grandparents' email that has EIGHTY GODDAMNED THOUSAND PROMOTIONAL EMAILS from HUNDREDS OF PLACES that I have to unsubscribe from....
Small tip with massive impact on your Inbox: For years, I had a filter to move anything that had the word “Unsubscribe” in the body of the email to Spam. It may be dangerous to them, perhaps, but I find that less than 1% of what goes there is something I needed to pay attention to.
There are some aspects of this I am not sure about. Particularly reviews. For professional reviews, are companies still allowed to seed review units to the press? Are companies even allowed to invite the press to release events? Wouldn’t any articles coming from those events be considered paid advertising? Professional reviews are still objectively a good thing.
Also advertising does still fill the role of informing the consumer. I have found some good services from Theo’s and Fireship’s YouTube channels. LTT vets their sponsors pretty well, so they are also a useful source of information. Many open source frameworks and libraries have sponsored links to other software that it works well with. Recently, I bought the Ozlo sleep buds from an LTT sponsored video and the WAN show follow up. I have had them for months now, and am incredibly happy with them. Without that ad, I would absolutely not even know about them.
That being said, I am absolutely happy with throwing out that baby with the disgusting bath water that is advertising.
As someone who has given this way too much thought:
The line to be drawn is essentially "The targeted audience must opt-in, and not be rewarded or punished for their decision."
So some banned activities:
Some permitted activities:
Because you can walk out when the movie is over, but you can't see behind a billboard. There would need to be some strict rules regarding reviewer integrity, as that's the blurriest line.
Broadcast TV/Radio would be the hardest to limit, but I think falls roughly under the "after content" pattern: A strictly regimented 3-6 minute window per half/full hour, no breaking content for ads.
I think this is a very good framework. It would be difficult to regulate; I think we would need an entire new regulatory body. But it’s still a very good framework.
What do you mean by the target group needing to be opt in? All advertising is targeted advertising. If you don’t believe me, take a trip to the Bay Area. San Francisco, Oakland, Palo Alto, etc. Most of their billboards are tech things that you likely haven’t heard of.
So now do we have to opt in to advertising at a movie? On the documentation page for a software library? It feels like it’s going to be the GDPR cookie notice all over again.
Some level of targeting needs to happen, and I don’t think it’s tenable to mark all advertising opt in.
So my idea there boils down to: The advertising is not required in order to view the content, in a consistent manner. By forcing ads to be tacked on at the end, opposed to before or intermingled, the opt-in is achieved by giving the user to avoid them completely. Billboards would be banned, as there is no way to reasonably provide that same level of mechanism.
I made that somewhat broad on purpose. However, @shu gave a great example; if I'm in the market for mattresses, I should be able to opt-in to that specifically, rather than a data analysis company spying on me to try to figure out that I'm in that market. And when I opt-out, that method is gone.
I'm envisioning some level of centralized marketing body which provides that service, which provides a universal but private mechanism (ala an anonymous opt-out flag in a browser enforced by law) which allows marketers to provide that opt-in targeting, while not requiring the terrible experience of the cookie notice.
Yeah, ads could actually become useful, if we could freely decide to receive them, like a temporary subscription for specific product ranges. We'd get actual product information, and not deceiving manipulative marketing that's mainly created to grab our attention.
Currently ads are a cancer on our societies.
Isn’t a self post a kind of ad?
Yes. Note that there isn't a current ban on advertising.
I'm not saying that this is what you're doing - your comment is very brief - but people are often critiqued for taking part in systems that they are questioning or advocating against. Unfortunately the reality is that unless we abolish the systems that we exist within completely, we still have to live within them. You can't just stop advertising yourself even if you think advertising shouldn't exist, because there's no other system in place for you to use to do things like drive traffic or sell.
I think a world without advertising would be so obviously better than the world we are in now that I don't know why we aren't trying to figure it out. I often think of it idly, and it's easy to raise the objection "but what is advertising? where do you draw the line?" But that's true of a lot of things, and if we're truly determined to reject the money that comes from advertising business, we can figure it out. Or we could get part of the way there, and still have made life much better for virtually everyone.
On a different note, one thought I had for a definition of advertising was something like "paid promotion". Basically, attack the money - it makes for a very bright line. But I wonder would we then see illegal advertising (basically people being bribed to advertise)? Would we still see completely free promotion by "advertisers"? Weird sorts of in-kind payments to try and get around laws? I'm curious what kind of a hydra it would be.
I suspect you’d have to be a lot more specific than simply going after the money directly.
“No sir he’s not buying advertising, he’s not allowed to. He’s just buying FaceBux virtual credits which you can use to play games or trade for stuff via Facebook Marketplace. Oh yes and boost your post to be higher in the algorithm but that’s separate, there’s no money involved at that stage of the process”
“No sir it’s not a paid review, that would be illegal. We just sent 20 of our flagship phone to make absolutely sure we didn’t accidentally send a dodgy one for his review. What’s that, you’re saying he sold the other 19 phones on the secondhand market and made a bunch of money? Good for him I’m glad he found a use for all those phones and they didn’t become e-waste!”
Another aspect of making ads illegal is limiting consumerism. Western societies consume so much more than they really need, and that won't work for much longer, especially because non-western societies are catching up. If we keep consuming at this pace, we'll crash hard in a few generations even if we somehow manage to mitigate climate change. There are only so much resources our little planet has to offer.
I think one good alternative is to allow the end users to buy/crowdfund advertising for non-commercial uses, especially in a pool that can be used across several advertising spots.
Google used to have Contributor v1 where you add your own bid to display anything you want if you win. Still, unlike ad blockers Google still receive, store and use your visit history to serve ads. It still needs to display something in the ads space where adblockers tidy up the space. It is also not 100% of the time you will win, even with high monthly budget. It was available for very limited number of countries before it was discontinued.
There was Scroll, who implemented ads-free subscription for several news websites (it does not include paywall bypass). Twitter acquired it and rolled it into a part of Twitter Blue. Elon killed it when Blue become X Premium.
There was a time people crowdfunded to buy skytrain ads for art. They raised 2 million baht (~$60k US), and I heard they covered 2 trains for 2 weeks where every single physical ads spot inside and outside (not including the TV) become art display.
Another way to think about it is that we invest, as a society, about 1-2% (IIRC from what I've read in the past) of our resources & workforce to advertising. Isn't there something better we can do with that capital and these people ? To note ads are effectively paid for by a sort of VAT tax on products we buy, so it's predominantly paid by low-middle class, although you can somewhat avoid it if you buy no-brand products.
I travelled to Havana once and there was zero advertising anywhere. It was really amazing.
How about: "Banning any and all forms of advertising used with the purpose of inducing hyperconsumerism in any audience."
That way, advertising can still have a space to exist; but now it can't do things like suggest that people can achieve a desirable lifestyle but only if they drink smoothie-chain's 1000 calorie smoothies. The local secondhand store can still at least advertise that they exist, are real, and are at x address.
I'd be ok with "Banning unethical advertisement". Then defining that.
Unethical ads would be those that mislead/manipulate (which includes what you said, using personal info, political mud slinging, etc...), harass (popups, sound, self playing videos, etc...) or trick (fake games, fake articles - including: fake article ads, the article themselves designed to show ads with content copied from elsewhere or AI generated (think "slideshows" articles & those abominations that have ads every other paragraph).
This seems more plausible.
That would lead to a lot of court cases. People don't just shrug their shoulders and say oh, I just won't now.
Litigation based on intent to do something that abstract would be a pain.
I think the end of advertising would make it harder for new brands to establish. Whatever the top brands are now would remain indefinitely in that position.