The idea feels like sci-fi because you’re so used to it, imagining ads gone feels like asking to outlaw gravity. But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence. Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.
The traditional argument pro-advertising—that it provides consumers with necessary information—hasn’t been valid for decades.
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The web has been cleaned with uBlock Origin. Doing that IRL would be great. And for every stupid counter argument (I’ve seen those on HackerNews), I don’t tolerate brain washing.
The most stupid argument I’ve seen is from an American who said “what if you don’t know about the effects of a drug that could save your life?” Well, that’s the job of the doctor. Your society has failed if you rely on marketing to eat random chemical dangerous stuff.
“what if you don’t know about the effects of a drug that could save your life?”
lol what? No way anyone says that with a straight face
5 minutes ago on Hacker News, among a lot of stupid stuff like “your life is empty without having ads all around you.”
Reference for fun: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43596333
I love that in Cyberpunk 2077 they’re is often a channel on called “just ads”. Of course in pure cyberpunk style those ads can be horrific.
Word of mouth works for someone with an already established customer base but I can’t even imagine how I could have gotten my business going when I started a year ago without ads. That’s how 99% of my customers found out about me. This is physical flyers though - I don’t do online advertising except for maintaining a some kind of social media presence for my business.
The economy should exist to serve real needs of the people. All that advertisement does is create a fake desire for consumption which simply wastes respurces.
Getting rid of advertising in a capitalist society would be devastating for all new and small businesses. Start an IT company, tow truck company, Trash removal, plumber, electrician, pest, all dead. Really any company that isnt already known would likely die, and the current large companies would be the only ones that exist. Also what counts as advertising, am I going to jail for telling my friend about a new game I tried? That’s advertising.
There used to be a business catalog book called “yellow pages”. Now there are map applications, price comparison sites, customer review sites, and keyword search engines. All of those make advertisements unnecessary.
That’s advertising. The entire phone book was a sold adventure. Jail, prison, what is the punishment for advertising. I think people have forgotten what advertising is. I ask you you favorite movie, you answer, advertising. If you tell me Lemmy is a decent place, advertising. Any app, game, movie, music, software, hardware, car, plant, advertising. Stop talking about any object if you want ALL advertising to be illegal as the description says
It’s also a form free market distortion that actual economic conservatives should hate.
Rather than having firms compete for who can make the best product or service, advertising instead lets them compete based on who can best psychologically manipulate the population en masse.
It’s a “rich get richer” mechanic that any halfway competent dev would’ve patched out for balance reasons a long time ago.
It’s also such a funny contradiction: a big part of the free market model rests on the idea that well informed consumers can vote with their wallet, which should reward good businesses and punish bad ones. Yet it is very difficult to argue consumers have ever been informed enough to make this work, which is in large part due to advertising flooding communication channels with noise, and also because it is unreasonable to expect a consumer to be fully informed for the hundreds of purchases they make on a daily basis.
You cannot get away from advertising, ever, in any society, in any financial system, at any point of time in history after tribal societie.
It’s a concept that you can’t just “ban”, nearly all the problems we have with it today is because it’s uncontrolled and abused. The concept itself though is as unbannable as the concept of “selling” something.
The concept:
“trying to find someone who can use something you made”
Is literally as old as humans moving away from tribal societies.
You can make the best thing in the world, but if no one knows about it, it’s still useless.
Lmao, this is absolute defeatist nonsense.
“You’ve gotta help us doc, we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas”.
Because here’s the thing, you literally just can ban advertising. Ban billboards, ban tv Ads, ban social media advertising.
You can still have companies publish information about their product, but that’s not what advertising is in the context of this discussion.
Right there are plenty of ways for businesses to get consumers to choose to use their product other than advertising which are far more conducive to consumers being able to make an informed purchase decision without being manipulated. But doing so would upend the existing power structures of who gets to sell more product, so disturbing the status quo just requires more political will than anybody really has.
You can find ads for products in Roman republic era graffiti. We have had ads for thousands of years.
Graffiti, you say? So it was probably illegal.
I know the rule of law is in sad shape right now, but companies still avoid doing illegal shit right out in the open, and that’s all that’s needed to cut back dramatically on advertising.
It’s already been done. Sao Paolo Brazil banned all outdoor advertisements.
No they didn’t that’s not banning advertising but that’s regulating a specific type of advertising.
There’s a pretty big difference.
And if you have the name of your business and what you sell on your store front? That’s advertising. Or a card with your name on it to hand out to customers or coupons. That’s advertising. Or logos on clothing or a sign that sits near the road that says SALE. That is advertising.
OP was downvoted for saying the truth, regulation is important, but businesses will fail if they have no way to catch your interest.
In fact it gets worse because small businesses will never be seen because nobody will have heard of them and everyone goes to the big store everyone already knows about.
There is balance to be had…
Lemmy is essentially just like Reddit at this point. It’s just a bunch of the lowest common denominator circle jerking a lack of critical thinking.
You cannot have intelligent discussion, and group think is all that matters. Folks will not read your comment, they will find the single phrase they disagree with and hold onto it for dear life, missing the entire point.
And then ignore the whole premise and idea behind the discussion and reply in a way that makes absolutely no sense if they had average reading comprehension…
I miss the old Internet, where you could actually have discussions and pass ideas back and forth.
Don’t ever—for any reason—do anything to anyone for any reason ever. No matter what, no matter where, or who, or who you are with, or where you are going, or where you’ve been… ever, for any reason whatsoever…
The problem is: Where does advertising start. Is mentioning a brand name somewhere already advertising? If I have a brand, call it GLURP, am I allowed to print GLURP on the product, on the box, on the instructions? Am I allowed to have a website called GLURP.com, and what would be allowed to be shown there? Can I open a shop and have a sign “GLURP” over the window? Can I really exhibit my products there?
Because all of this is advertising.
I think we can all agree that 99.99% at least of intruding ads on the net, billboards, TV, radio, whatever, are annoying and should go away. But any ruling trying to reign this in needs to set 100% clear and undisputable limits, because they will sacrifice their own kids to somehow skirt such a law. If you don’t believe me, look at tax laws and how the rich don’t pay taxes (despite frequent bouts of crying over the 37% they never pay).
Ok but what if invent a new product that nobody even knows how to use? Just hope people take the chance on random unknown thing. Where is the ad non ad line drawn?
The communication methods mentioned in the summary can work for this. It might take longer than a quarter-year to peak/saturate the market but introducing such a novel product should require longer-term thought.
What communication method that could exist that is not fundamentally an ad. Unless people go around window shopping but then again is window of the shop an ad? What if you put a little board with pricing there? What if it’s written very nicely?
I think a bad ad is bad and good ad is good, it’s OK to police this but outright ban seems kinda silly to realize
That’d be great, but the “how” is a much harder question. What counts as advertising? Because there’s a reason Google, Meta, etc. have their fingers in so many different industries: every single thing that gets attention could be leveraged for advertising, even the act of suppressing mentions of competitors.
Should I be able to say “X product has been great, I recommend it!” Only if I’m not being paid, you say? How could you possibly know?
As discussed in the article, “propaganda” is illegal. So any discussion about how terrible trump is would also be illegal. Propaganda doesn’t mean false, it just means it’s trying to convince you of something. An advertisement. Heck, the article itself could be considered a form of advertising for legislation.
It’s just so trivial of a concept to say, but the moment you spend any amount of time thinking about it, it falls apart. It’s like trying to ban the Ship of Theseus from a club.
The phrase “ban advertising” is reductive. Different countries have different laws around ads. For example, anime shows have bumpers in them because in Japan they are required by law to clearly indicate when advertising starts and stops.
There’s also laws against billboards, against targeting children, against specific industries, and limiting the amount of advertising available. I could see laws against targeted ads like Meta uses being implemented as well.
What counts as advertising?
Let’s say you ban ad breaks on TV / streams. In the early days of radio and TV they didn’t have ad breaks, the host of the show would just go on for a while about his favourite brand of cigarettes. In the modern world, pretty much any time you see a name brand in a TV show or movie, it’s because they’ve been paid for product placement.
So… you could solve that by never allowing the mentioning of any brand name in any form of media. That would make reviews illegal. That’s fair, I suppose, because reviews are definitely seen as a form of advertising. That’s why companies often provide review copies of things for free to journalists in the hope they might talk/write about them. Maybe you could carve out an exception allowing a brand and model to be mentioned if there are safety issues or product recalls?
Ok, so now you have a Formula 1 event, it’s on TV but you have to pay for that broadcast because it’s not ad supported. The cars, of course, don’t have any ads on them. But, are they allowed to have the manufacturer’s name and logo on them? Is it advertising if say Ferrari puts a lot of money into F1, wins a lot, and so when you watch the news you see Ferrari-red cars with Ferrari logos winning a race? Also, could the drivers wear coveralls with the Ferrari logo on them? What about fans of Ferrari, could they wear a shirt with the Ferrari logo on them if they were simply fans of the brand? What if this supposed Ferrari fan were a supermodel? Does someone have to carefully go through the finances of any very attractive person to see if they’re ever wearing a logo not because they’re a fan but because they’ve been compensated?
I’m in favour of reducing the amount of advertising we see. I think it’s a bit absurd now. But, while it’s possible to tax it or regulate it, I think it would be very hard to completely eliminate it.
That’d be great, but the “how” is a much harder question.
As with the implementation of any obvious law, of course.
What counts as advertising? Because there’s a reason Google, Meta, etc. have their fingers in so many different industries: every single thing that gets attention could be leveraged for advertising, even the act of suppressing mentions of competitors.
Sure, maybe that’s an interesting question.
After all television commercials and magazine inserts and pop up ads and billboards are gone we can start debating the nuance of where exactly the line is drawn.
Should I be able to say “X product has been great, I recommend it!” Only if I’m not being paid, you say?
Correct!
How could you possibly know?
You would have to report that income on your taxes and if you ever get audited and that was a substantial amount of your income they will find out and go after the major players who are profiting off it illegally at tax time.
Think about gambling or alcohol. How do we know you aren’t selling unlicensed alcohol or running an unlicensed casino? We still have laws despite the uncertainty.
As discussed in the article, “propaganda” is illegal. So any discussion about how terrible trump is would also be illegal.
I feel like you’re confused about the difference between speech and propaganda. Discussion about Trump isn’t propaganda.
I know we currently do not, but it is possible to treat an individual and a business/corporation differently.
It is possible to hold an organizations speech to different standards than an individual.
The discussion of outlawing propaganda doesn’t have to have anything to do with your individual ability to express your opinion up until the point you try to organize and artificially broadcast that speech wider than you could on your own.
So, first off, any content made to change your mind is propaganda. Doesn’t matter how true or false it is, doesn’t matter if it’s cherry-picking info, doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make any claims at all, doesn’t matter if it’s paid for by a state or a religious group or a single individual. And it HAS to be defined this way, because there does not exist an impartial arbitrating party to draw a distinction for us. If we try to limit it only to information meant to mislead, then we have to figure out who decides whether something is misleading.
A poster that just says “hang in there” or “just give up” can be used as propaganda if you post it all over the place to raise or lower morale. It’s not making any claims, it’s not pushing a certain brand, it’s just trying to change what you think about. That’s propaganda.
Second, this whole thing assumes no one ever wants to see an advertisement. But if you’re arguing honestly, the reality is that sometimes you do. You want to know your favorite band is playing downtown. You want to know that the roofing company across town that does good work even exists. You want to know about whatever new silly product was made that aligns with your hobbies. In order to have an honest conversation, we need to agree that not all advertising is unwanted.
all television commercials and magazine inserts and pop up ads and billboards are gone we can start debating the nuance of where exactly the line is drawn
Would PSAs be banned? Those are nothing if not propaganda. How about billboards advertising a religious group? What if I buy a magazine because it does a great job at making me aware of products I actually do often want to buy?
You would have to report that income on your taxes
And what if I benefit in an indirect, difficult way to trace outside of being paid? Or what if it’s MY company?
know we currently do not, but it is possible to treat an individual and a business/corporation differently…It is possible to hold an organizations speech to different standards than an individual.
As a small business owner, how do I make customers aware that I exist?
until the point you try to organize and artificially broadcast that speech wider than you could on your own.
Where is that line? We’ve invented so many things that amplify our speech wider than what we could do “on our own”. A megaphone reaches more people than if I yell. A 10ft sign in my yard reaches more people than a tshirt. A social media account with 1 million followers reaches people than 1000 followers reaches more than 10 followers. Should I be able to make a flyer? Should I be able to use a printing press to copy that flyer? Should i be able to nail copes of that flyer all over the door of the catholic church and start a Reformation? Where is the line?
(It’s also worth reading up on the history of advertising in television in the UK. The idea of creating legislation to limit the prevalence of advertising is not new, and neither are the methods used to work around them.)
In summary, this is a very hard problem, but…I think the solution could be solved democratically. I don’t think the solution lies in trying to rigorously define what constitutes an ad, only for the form of an ad to morph. Rather, it lies in disincentivizing people seeing unwanted ads in the first place. The fact that people look around and see ads they don’t want to see needs to be translated directly into some kind of proportional tax.
Ex. If you poll the people, and they say “I see too many McDonalds ads” then the people (i.e. govt) should penalize McDonalds proportionally. If we poll again, and the penalty doesn’t result in people reporting seeing fewer unwanted McDonalds ads, then increase the penalty. When the penalty is high enough, it won’t be worth it for McDonalds to run so many aggressive ads, and they’ll have to reduce advertising in order for the people to report fewer unwanted ads in order for the penalty to drop. That’s the only possible implementation I see as actually working.
Thanks for writing an essay so I no longer feel the need to lol. I hope your post gets more visibility.
I fucking hate advertising. I want it banned to the greatest extent that we can do so. But if we want actual change, it needs to be a lawfully applicable strategy. We don’t need to make the perfect the enemy of the good. Banning ads for medication is a great start that everyone can agree on for instance. We should work up from there.
The most insidious stuff is the content you don’t even realize is an ad, like comments and methods of boosting/lowering visibility on social media. That is a thorny issue.
The idea that advertising is a new invention is nonsense.
Yes, it had different forms but it was there.
Eg: What are the priests if not sales people and what are the Sunday bells if not calls to action, and what are the icons and statues if not aspirational advertising and fomo?
What are shop windows? What are branding marks?
Here is advertising in Ancient Rome
I have nothing against pull advertising so that if I need something I go somewhere and pull some advertisement to get information about a product I need or want. Window shopping, going to church seem like that.
But shoving ads down my throat, no thanks.
My point is that the premise of the article is untrue - harking to a past that never was.
Don’t church bells shove advertising down your ears? How about if I open a competing church with louder bells? What if I open a donut shop and I ring bells to notify you that a fresh batch is ready?
“No more bells then”, cool.
How about mosques? No bells, just a guy screaming from a tall balcony. And another and another.
Even in communist Russia you had propaganda ads everywhere.
There are plenty of ways currently of blocking most ads out of online media anyway - though underhanded means like product placement etc still sip through.
I was on a car from ride sharing app recently, and there was a tablet in front of me playing ads continuously for the whole ride. Asked the driver to turn it off and he said, “I have to keep it on”. I know it’s not the requirement from the app, so honestly how dystopian is it?
The way things are going people can’t afford anything and will have ads blasting in front of them for discounts.
I wouldve left an awful review, 1 star, no tip. Thats such shit to do. Fuck that guy.
Then we’d have a centrally-planned economy I guess. I don’t really see how a free market would work without advertising.
At the very least it comes down to regulation of speech. Advertising is speech. Even if you got rid of like actual commercials, you’ll just shift advertising towards product placement and utilization rather than over advertisements.
Definitely a complex thing.
It would make promoting new art and events downright difficult.
What’s wrong with making a societal shift where people learn to go out and look for what they want? It’s not like you can’t have a website with a schedule of all the activities for your ________. And if people want to see or do ________ they can come find out when and where instead of the constant barrage of shit they aren’t interested in anyway.
There are better ways.
And you know about this website how exactly?
Seriously advertisements have been used for thousands of years because they solve a very real problem namely how do you get people interested in the extra stuff you have?
You realize searching the web can exist without ads or unfair pay structures … right??
Ok? How do you know about these websites if you only have word of mouth?
Unfair pay structures have nothing to do with this.
Believe it or not, advertising on the Internet was originally highly frowned upon. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Siegel
Still is, but it used to be, too.
I’ve literally never understood the advertising industry.
Like, a company gives another company money to waste bandwidth… How many people even watch ads? As a kid, that’s when you’d leave the TV to get a drink or use the bathroom. As an adult, I run adblockers and haven’t see an advertisement in ages - yet these companies are continuing to spend money on this?
What’s worse is how they actually think people associate the random shit that plays before/during the content you want to watch to the point that they’re forcing creators to dumb down the content. Like, I get it if the platform itself is shit, but come on. If you REALLY want to know what’s harming your brand, it wouldn’t be the guy saying “shit fuck” 50 times, it would be the fucking advertisement that’s breaking the flow and interrupting the guy saying “shit fuck” 50 times. I’d sooner see people avoiding these products specifically because of the negative association.
You and I both. But we are not the norm. And advertising works (even on us when we do end up seeing them).
It’s bizarre to me to be around my parents and others who just let ads play, and watch them, and engage about them. But people just get used to them and everyone thinks THEY aren’t swayed by them. We are though - which is why I would completely support banning ads beyond basic signage for businesses and outside of dedicated locations where I can go when I actually need something.
