What If We Made Advertising Illegal?
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.
https://simone.org/advertising/Open linkView original on lemmy.sdf.org1436
Comments358
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.
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.
There are shopping channels in many countries (or at least paid cable television) which are literally just ads. In classic cyberpunk style, it's a reflection of the dystopian present.
That's not an ad, it's the "Scamming old people by phone" show.
They’re on HN acting like Googling and getting WebMD is uüuber rare
When I watch a US sport, I'm blown away that the ads are all medical, banking/insurance, cars, and maybe fast food. It's so weird.
Don't forget personal injury or liability lawyers.
And gambling.
What’s a normal selection of sports ads look like elsewhere?
Every time I watch premier league it’s just gambling ads nonstop lol
I was going to note it down as I was watching F1 at the time of writing that comment. There was a kids hospital charity, a food charity, a car, other sport, and a travel/tourism ad.
Wow, even if we imagine some different situation where information about a new development, service or creation is needed, that's what reviews and journalism are supposed to cover, not advertisement. (In b4: the observation that those have tragically been becoming more and more indistinguishable from advertising.)
They are still illegal in many countries.
If only there was a system of interconnected knowledge bases where new information could be published and indexed for easy lookup... Nah what am I saying, who would have interest in such a thing...
Don't be silly, no-one knows what a library is these days! They're all stuck on that internet thing.
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:
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.
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.
People who think they have a right to deface other people's property say the weirdest shit.
Yeah, and it used to be legal to dump your industrial waste in the river, now it's not.
Laws change.
In both situation you make it illegal for corporations to do something, and punish them with fines and criminal sentences for executives if they're caught doing so, leading to a decrease in that behaviour.
So what about the situations do you see as different that makes it a false equivalency?
It's already been done. Sao Paolo Brazil banned all outdoor advertisements.
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secrets-sao-paulo-uncovered-outdoor-advertising-ban/
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.
This is a new phenomenon here in my experience, the cynic in me says this is ad companies trying to control and shut down the conversation as Lemmy grows. Better to have your opposition not have a realistic and feasible route to their goals.
It reminds me of how close the US was to actual police reform before all the discussion became "defund the police entirely" like that was going to just suddenly fix everything and cause no other problems. Then the whole movement just basically evaporated.
I was really suprised to see downvotes for your comment. It was balanced and demonstrated nuance for the concept.
We have an example of an advertisement from 3000 BCE. This is part of the human condition of transfer of information with a hey I make a cool thing, interested in buying it?
Now as for Lemmy, I hope it doesn't get completely bad like reddit. The worse offenders are political or ideological posts like this one.
I am still have good discussions in other areas, so here's hoping.
I miss the old internet too.
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 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.
There is some awareness effect, too. If I like burgers and see a listing for a new burger place in my neighborhood, learning about a potential new place I'd like to include in my going-out rotation feels like a win. If I need a home repair and see a neighbor with a yard sign for a local contractor, that's helpful in compiling a list of potential companies to check out.
What about word of mouth? If I want to find a good place to eat, I find asking a local "hey what's the best restaurant around here?" to yield way better results than ads.
It would be totally sufficient if those things are listed in search engines or maps. Not as ads for other searches but as actual results when you actually search for that stuff. If you like burgers it would be no problem for you to type "burger near me" into your favourite search engines once in a while if you feel like something new. Same for home repair etc.
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.
You're absolutely right. Any small business left would beg big corporations for buyouts, for pennies on the dollar. Small time influencers would skirt it by the millions. It'd make cyberpunk fiction look tame.
It might be better if some "standard catalog" was popularized, but still a calamity.
Yeah I mean a had a Lyft driver give me a card for her son the other day who opened a mobile hair salon. Is it useful for people, sure. Could he exist without advertising, absolutely not.
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
bear in mind that the linked article expands and clarifies that it doesn't mean banning all ads, it's is talking about banning specifically paid ads (i.e. the advertised thing is spending money to be shown) and/or third-party ads (i.e. the advertised thing being shown in places that don't already refer to them). So word of mouth is fine, a business catalog book is fine, all comparison/customer review/keyword search sites are fine, etc. The one thing I can think about is the smaller companies and businesses finding it much harder to gain traction, but word of mouth would replace advertisements and word of mouth is already quite effective - see the very site we're talking on right now!
I think life would feel more calm, spacious and peaceful.
100%!
The most hectic places in the world are the screens-filled streets of Tokyo and New York IMO (that's not all the streets ofc)
Ads try to grab your attention or show off right into your face, removing them would 100% make life more tranquil.
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.
My adblocker agrees.
Spam != Ads.
Those lawyers crossed a line.
I really like the wording of these article.
I'm just going to take this opportunity to remind everyone that you can and should donate to your Mastodon and Lemmy instances, even if it's just $5 a month. That's how we band together to keep these platforms ad-free, and I don't know about you all, but I love that my mind isn't being manipulated here.
Advertising needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking.
It arbitrary pollutes any environment it’s conducted in, and causes secondary harms to non-participants by incentivising insecure hoarding of private information with the intent to better target individuals.
The privacy thing isn't necessarily part of advertising though.
Advertising can be as complex as targeted algorithms built using harvested information and even AI bullshit, or as simple as a sign by the road saying "next right for MegaBurger" or even a small box with "Bob's autoglass repair" in the paper.
It's the volume and invasiveness that's a problem. Ads in your mailbox, ads in your inbox, ads on your streaming service and when you turn on your Roku etc etc acting as blockers to the content you're actually looking for.
I'm totally cool too go back to having an "autoglass" or "plumbers" section in paper and online yellow Pages etc, which target people actually looking for a service. I'm also cool with places which I subscribe to advertising me deals I might like (not so much signing me up for their shit the first time I buy from them), but the shoving crap in people's face and information harvesting that needs to end.
Hell, I even have a collection of saved ads that were clever and entertaining I'd share with people, yet most companies go for volume (both audible and amount) over substance
Also roadside advertisements for services are also acceptable, what I mean is something like Peggy Sues dinner where they've got some signs to let you know which off ramp to take. Frankly speaking allowing gas stations and food places to advertise off the side of the highway is pretty reasonable to me, even in the modern era with phones the usefulness of them can very either because you don't want to look at it while driving or it's just got no signal.
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.
As with the implementation of any obvious law, of course.
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.
Correct!
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.
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.
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?
And what if I benefit in an indirect, difficult way to trace outside of being paid? Or what if it's MY company?
As a small business owner, how do I make customers aware that I exist?
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.
This is the second time this has been stated. I don't know why we're going backwards, I haven't challenged the definition of propaganda.
Exactly. Under this law all these scenarios would be banned.
That's the conversation we're having, how to ban it.
The law wouldn't target things that "can be used" for propaganda, they'd target things that are used for propaganda.
If some individual wants to go around and spend his own money putting up "Hang in there" posters, that's fine.
If they want to pay someone to hang up posters for them, that's when they'd run into issues.
If a public space or place of business wants to put up a sign, you might make exceptions for things like emergency evacuations and informational material, but anything with "intent to advertise a brand or product" would certainly be banned.
"Hang in there" might end up being allowed or not in a workplace depending on how strict you'd like to get.
Its weird you're acting like I'm dishonest. This is a pretty simple concept.
Unwanted advertisement are unwanted.
The companies are still allowed to create materials, and you're allowed to view it. They just aren't allowed to pay people to shove it in your face when you're trying to watch TV or read the news.
Of course there's value in knowing about products and deals, but if company's are the ones paying for them then the companies with the most money get seen and heard the most.
That's a problem because throwing money at ads can compensate for a sub par product. Keeping advertisements independent from the companies selling them is better for consumers as it leads to less biased info.
If you want to buy a catalog of local events, that's fine people can make those "advertisements" and sell them. It would be illegal for the people operating them to have connections or take money from the companies, and these aren't explicitly ads but genuine reviews basically.
You can print a list of bands and distribute it, you just can't advertise the band in some unrelated product.
Exceptions could be made for anything if we want.
What do you think? Would you ban PSAs? I might not.
100% banned. No billboards allowed.
Still exists. The magazine just can't take money to artificially promote shitty brands who pay them so the magazine is higher quality.
(That's obviously slightly naive, we're crashing the entire magazine industry by passing this law, it's too disruptive in the short term to the economy we've set up)
You wouldn't have to. Word of mouth and the community curated lists would talk about you if you're worth talking about.
If no one can advertise then consumers are still gonna need to find the products they need and consumers will learn how to look for local businesses and the community will learn how to spotlight hidden gems.
Or maybe that's too much effort and we all just go to walmart and you go out of business. Hopefully not, but i don't fully know tbh, it's untested.
Yep, you should be able to do all of that (except the social media one possibly depending on context) because they're all actions of a single individual and no money is being spent of the distribution of the material.
(You can pay a printer to print the flyers but not hand out essentially).
If you want to rent a plane and drop them from the sky go ahead but you can't do that as a business or to make money in any way.
I agree, it would take a lot of trial and error but we could eventually figure it out.
We won't because money is too powerful, but we could.
I honestly don't like that idea. We're not seeing less ads, we're just seeing more diverse ads.
Genuinely consider the implications of the fact that advertisements are effective.
Think of the most irritating, scummy, clickbait, insidious advertisement you've ever seen, and then consider that it objectively made the company more money than not running it.
Realize that your small business is directly losing customers because you aren't able to compete with the marketing budgets of megacorporations.
Its not fair for your company and thus us as consumers they get to pay to hold the megaphone longer than you do and don't compete by the quality of their products/service. It's a bad problem.
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.
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.
Took a trip to Cuba, one of the first things I noticed was lack of billboards and advertising in general. It was quite refreshing.
Another example of that is Pyongyang. They do have billboards to Kim Jong Un, and memorials to Kim Jong Il. But, for the most part the city is free of billboards. It's really strange if you're used to modern western cities.
Advertising is pollution
Advertising is illegal in São Paulo. At least, outdoor advertising is illegal.
Look closely -- what don't you see?
Birds
Well obviously, we all know birds aren't real
Otters!
Wait, no, geraffes
Geraffes are dumb. Stupid long horses.
There are ads on the very right side, middle, of this picture
oh nice catch. In retrospect this might actually be an older photo.
Strangely, I don't see any people, mainly because they're either so small they appear microscopic in the picture, or because they're being blocked from view by the buildings.
Should we allow the best of science to be used to manipulate people's base desires? Or should we protect the average person from being taken advantage of?
Unless you are a sociopath the answer is clear. Advertising in its current form should be completely banned. Perhaps some form of non-comparative advertising could be allowed if it just stated simple facts without creating a psychological hook to subconsciously fuck with the consumer.
Who am I kidding though, give these fuckers even an inch and they will circumnavigate the globe. Ban all advertising.
Yes yes yes, this!
I always joke w my gf, that when I'm president, I'll ban marketing. It's ugly, wasteful, useless (from the consumer's pov,) annoying, etc. I can't believe it's not hyper-regulated and taxed into oblivion.
How....Would you do that?
You do know that that marketing or advertising is far FAR more fundamental right? Yeah, there is a lot of BS these days, for sure.
But the concept of trying to find someone to sell something you made too cannot be banned. Unless you have a solution to the entire concept of "selling" anything, and turn society into one without needs?
It's 5000 BC and I just made a pot with a lip that pours water easier. I tell someone about this in hopes they might want one too so i can survive on my work <----- that's advertising.
It's 2000 BC and I discovered a new spice and am trying to sell it for cooking. I demonstrate how it smells <----- that's advertising.
....etc Apply this to almost everything anyone has made that they try to sell to someone else. They advertise and market it.
right now, your own post, marketing what you might do as president.... Is a form of marketing.
It's deeply engrained in every single society, and has been for thousands (tens of thousands?) of years. It's a fundamental concept for humans and humans society.
They and possibly op (with their argument that 99.9% ad free) is referring to modern day advertisements that mass manipulates people. A person in 2000 BC telling their spice is better doesn't compare to our modern advertisement system which targets suggestible people with well placed targeted ads. They also are probably referring to those ads which you constantly see barging into your every day life in the form of billboards, banners etc. If you were to search for a something in Google, most often the front result would be non relevant SEO garbage or AI gibberish promoting something which is not relevant to something you searched. Oh you want to know why you have this BSOD screen and warning, check out this antivirus software sort of bullshit results.
Even though what you said is right, that advertisement has fundamentally existed ever since human moved out of tribal society, the form of advertisement we see now is never before seen and in my opinion which I agree with OP is than we can indeed abolish current form of advertisement and move on without significant impact on normal people. Ofcourse we would still be documenting products and people who want that could still seek out what they want based on their requirement (this might qualify as advertisement since the product won't be seen without information regarding it, but it's no way comparable to the form of advertisement you and I mentioned above).
You can and should make the distinction between being paid to advertise something and sharing information based on your believes. There is such a thing as free marketing and I agree you cannot ban that, but you can ban paid advertising in a similar way as paid sex is banned in many places across the world.
I'm now imagining advertising being carried out the same way prostitution is.
"Hey sailor, want some good product recommendations?"
Replace sailor with user and you're spot on. Instead of selling intimacy we sell our attention in exchange for content.
Would @[email protected] please share your thoughts on the response from @[email protected]?
Of course if these ideas were ever put into practice, they'd require the establishment of definitions, scope, parameters, exceptions, consequences, etc.
I think a lot of us understand the spirit of the OP, and you're showing us you aren't on the same page or even opened the book.
Sure, if the offered idea was to abolish every philosophically tangential advertisment, then you'll be the advertisor of reason when we advertise bans on flowers' colors because they advertise to pollinators, or bans on babies' cries because they're advertising their want of nourishment.
It's 5000bc.. do whatever your community needs, not what's gonna make you more money
You've been using bandwidth on ads?
Yes please. Blocking all advertising possible in my online presence did wonders for my sanity
If you need to pay someone to talk about your product, it’s probably not as good as you think.
I’m anti-advertising, but this simply isn’t true. Customers don’t show up out of thin air. They don’t care. Anyone who’s built or created anything knows that feeling invisible is the rule, not the exception.
A lot of us here on Lemmy are part of the software industry. Have you ever tried to make money by building a great app and waiting for users to trickle in? It doesn’t work. You might as well declare bankruptcy before you start. Selling anything at all, let alone software, is like pulling teeth—and software is more often a luxury than a necessity, making it even harder.
(Granted, advertising has made the situation worse by training people to ignore any and all attempts to get their attention or communicate information.)
Approximately every successful software business has talented and hardworking salespeople behind the scenes. I’ve learned this the hard way: you need sales experts or you won’t sell a damn thing.
Maybe someday we can find a way to get by without ads. But let’s not pretend it’s as easy as “if you build it, they will come.”
Advertising is one of the three major incoherent industries along with Insurance and Real Estate.
Advertising is propaganda, propaganda should be illegal
It won't be though, because it is too powerful to control us
Imagine going to jail just because you tried to change someone's opinion about something. 🤦♂️
The article is about paid advertising. Paying someone to spread your opinion is in my eyes very different than telling someone about your opinion and trying to persuade that person to agree with you.
OMG someone in the wild that thinks the advertising industry is about free speech!
Idk how you got that dumbass idea. I'm pointing out that ads aren't the only thing that's propaganda and the kinds of consequences "banning all propaganda" might have. You can ban ads without also banning "propaganda." Words matter; especially when it comes to laws.
Fuck off shill, all propaganda is manipulation and manipulation is unethical
I block every strawmanning asshat, you aren't allowed to put words in my mouth anymore
"Are you sure about that?"
Send that fucker off to jail!
The salt that makes it propaganda and not just a convincing argument is the ulterior use of symbolism to unconsciously condition the victim
But I understand why children like you miss that nuance
Nuance that is not definitionally a part of what constitutes 'propaganda' whether you infantilize someone else for seeing things differently or not.
Go on, provide some examples and sources if you want to make such a grand claim.
Something being propaganda does not necessitate that it contains subliminal messaging, propaganda can be entirely overt and without unconscious conditioning techniques.
A convincing argument is propaganda, you just wrongly believe yourself to be above propaganda, the same way you seem to consider yourself above others generally...
So either you are an LLM, have poor reading comprehension, or are just actively being stupid.
Never in my statement was nuance a part of the definition. I specifically stated that the difference between propaganda and a convincing argument is the ulterior use of symbolism to manipulate the victim's outcomes.
The nuance portion was purely stating that such mental children cannot grasp the difference between propaganda and a convincing argument.
I look forward to seeing how you actively misunderstand this post too, what a fun game!
Nowhere did I misunderstand your post, you stated it back to me?
I'm saying that the difference you are describing doesn't exist, thus the nuance you ascribe 'mental children' to lack to perceive is imaginary.
I understand words convey a meaning beyond definitionally, but definitionally there is no mention of such a requirement. Thus I asked you for any sources backing up such a claim.
I have not deviated from what I said previously. Nor misinterpreted you intentionally whatsoever. Rather, I disagree with you.
Also I am not an llm, and I intend to discuss with you calmly and fairly and not misinterpret what you are saying. If you are willing to engage
Dont even bother. Dude just trolls and makes angry comments to everyone
Yep, LLM. So sad. You can tell by the inability to follow context.
Some post-processing can fix that, but I guess this bot wrangler wasn't informed
Somewhere along the line I read a scifi book where "truth in advertising" laws were used to convict advertisers so they could be put in jail and used as involuntary organ donors. And I am sad to say I wouldn't feel very sorry if that were a real thing. My hate for manipulative ads is so strong it overrides my hate for killing.
I'm on board and have been for a long time. I am true believer of Bill Hicks' opinion of marketing. I stopped watching broadcast/cable TV in the late 90's because I couldn't stand watching all the propaganda mixed in with the shows. Whenever I'm in a doctor's office lobby or somewhere that has a TV on, it's a bit of a shock to see all the commercial bullshit again.
Does wonders for you once it's not occupying space in your brain.
lol you want advertisers to kill themselves. Bill and George Carlin are my favorite comedians. Haven’t been able to find anyone else who hits the spot. Rip.
Well no, I’d prefer they just find another line of work, but…. 🤷
Check out Josh Johnson. He is the next George Carlin in my mind. His social commentary comedy is 🔥.
People talk about tech giants, but Facebook and Google are actually advertising giants. They pour much more money into their advertising than they do into r&d.
Many brands have a cost structure where, for each product sold, more money goes to advertising than to the person who actually made the product. Sometimes 2 or 3 times more. That's where the battle for attention is taking us, a place where attention from customers is worth much more than the effort of the worker.
None of this is inevitable, advertising should be heavily taxed and regulated.
I remember when signage with ads had no lighting. Even that would be an improvement so I’d like to see any kind of illumination gone too.
Maybe make an exception for ads that consist mostly of artwork that customers are being sold? I'm talking about things like album covers and book covers that are often works of art in their own right.
"THE JOY OF NOT BEING SOLD ANYTHING"
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.
this happened to me once and I gave them 1 star for forcing me to watch ads
I wouldve left an awful review, 1 star, no tip. Thats such shit to do. Fuck that guy.
Lol, almost no one tips as is right now.
Yeah. I didn't want to do immediately after the trip. But now I don't see the option to do it from the history of trips.
It should be text only, purely factual, and very limited.
“We are blah, selling blah for $x, at $location”
what if we made capitalism illegal? because all of the bullshit like advertising is symptomatic. the root cause is capitalism. western civilization has to be reset entirely. and it will never get done through protesting.
Yeah with advances in software and AI you could also manage the economy much more efficient and in real time than the old "planned economy". Shortages and problems could be handled quickly. With crowd funding you could also have banks providing funds for new enterprises (collectives / coops) by people voting democratically on what to approve.
The issue is that I haven't seen any serious work on improving socialism, which most socialists seem to think is a heretical concept. So there is a lack of valid alternatives to capitalism that people can imagine. And the power balance and technology for propaganda to control the population and weaponry and tactics the stage manage protests has advanced too.
And then there is the issue that no matter what ideology and system, those who desire power or wealth above anything else are more likely to attain it, and we haven't yet found good antibodies to this fundamental problem of managing power. Or even know about it.
yeah, i def agree about AI managed resources. we need to take away as many opportunities for greed and corruption as possible.
and really, this all comes down to letting science run the show rather than financiers and economists. the economy has replaced common sense.
Oh please yes
Put a 100% stop to advertising but also marketing altogether.
How do you propose new businesses will work? Genuinely looking for discussion.
I'm not the person you were replying to and I also don't have a good answer to the question, but man, the giddiness I feel at the idea of yeeting every single sales department on the planet directly into the stratosphere... Pure euphoria.
However that would work, i dont care. Open source software has next to no marketing and I've found it all through chat groups, etc.
I've found my local super market and bakery simply by walking by
I buy toothpaste by trying a few and sticking by one I like
I never watch commercials, I don't do advertising or marketing, and I'm missing out on nothing
The lines get really blurry.
Manufacturers pay grocery stores shelving fees, both to be stocked in that store at all and for specific locations (eye level shelving is prime real estate). That the toothpaste is on the shelf there at all for you to see it and decide to try it... is basically due to a paid advertisement.
Bakeries often put signs about openings or events at the end of the block. Do you think that should be banned, too? What about a billboard in their own parking lot?
You'rr under arrest for advertising open source software lol. It's illegal to discuss products as promotion is 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.
By growing.
How do they grow if they can't tell anyone about their products or services?
My local bakery doesn't have that issue
They just make great bread so people go there by the hundreds
Open source software doesn't have that problem, I found everything I love
Once I need a product I can go to a forum or chat group and find reviews
Your local bakery can rely on local customers who likely walk right by it. They produce inexpensive products that are relatively easy and quick to produce.
Not every business is like that. Maybe they spent a lot of money upfront on research and development and need to shift x units by a certain time to make it work financially? How could they do that if they have no physical presence on the high street and without telling people at scale that they exist?
Open source software is generally free, written by volunteers. There isn't the financial pressure to sell and recover costs by a certain time.
Perhaps there is a difference in listing a service in some sort of index, like the phone book, versus techniques intended to develop a need (or want) where there wasn't one otherwise, like an iPod commercial.
By telling them, who said you cant? Communication and advertisement are two different things.
Its crazy that by no advertisement you immediately jumped to you cant tell anyone about anything
By telling who? And How?
Communication isnt advertisement. Depends on the type of business dude. Theres a thing called word of mouth.
And how do you do that en-masse? How do you spread the word to people by word of mouth who haven't heard of your product/service?
I’ve found many wonderful products through advertising that I never would have otherwise. So many small businesses would have to be able to show off their products to new customers somehow.
It’s easy enough* to restrict advertising, there’s no need to throw the baby out with the bath water.
*we’ve done it before, we can do it again, and if we aren’t smart enough to figure it out then we deserve this bullshit honestly.
If you don't mind answering, what kind of advertising have you found products you now enjoy through?
Okay so Lemmy, Jerboa, Phone, ISP all were found via advertising. So if I am enjoying this conversation, every facit of it came to my notice via advertising. Word out mouth and online discussions are advertising
Word of mouth and discussions are not the kind of advertising being discussed in the article.
That would make more sense, maybe the title saying making all advertising illegal is inaccurate then.
Not at all. I find a fair amount through Kickstarter campaigns, like the Yarro Studios Dice-o-matic, and the mandolin Youtube channel I follow will obviously self-promote their Patreon which has all kinds of great content. A lot of product reviews done by stores would be likely counted as advertisements, too. I’ve found good music through Instagram ads for it and I don’t even listen to Negative25 but their ad videos are really funny skits all on their own.
The thing is that we tend to like to know about things that we will enjoy and we don’t mind watching good ads. Bad ads, ads that are lying or dancing around the truth, and especially ads for things we don’t care about(which is everything if it interrupts a tense moment in a show) are all what we really don’t want to see.
Seems to me it's an efficiency problem.
If you want to send an email to someone, you don't send it to a mailing list of all your contacts. You just send it to the person to whom it concerns. But suppliers, who want potential customers to be aware of their product, are just sending their message to as many people as possible. And even targeted advertising isn't useful because it aims to promote one product rather than helping customers to make a balanced assessment of all the choices available. Plus it's typically unsolicited and therefore an intrusion and an unwanted waste of time and attention.
People out there who want that product need to know what's on offer and who offers the best quality and value for money, which would have to come from an independent source. Independent review sites are a very good alternative to advertising, and maybe they could do more to promote new products and inform customers about things which would suit their needs, which would be a cost effective way to help suppliers reach their customers. That sounds a lot like advertising but if it were truly independent and on-demand, it wouldn't be. In theory AI might do a good job of this, but it's so open to abuse, it's a natural pathway to push whoever pays for promotion. If advertising were illegal, I wonder how you would police that.
More broadly, if we rely on reviewers to help customers find what they need, how can we ensure they are independent and fair? Maybe if there were a network of independent reviewers, they could act as a check on each other, if a reviewer consistently favors one brand when the rest don't, it could be somehow highlighted and shown up as a bias.
Imagine how much labour and money we’d free up to do actually useful things like help homeless people and disabled people etc. If we cut all those marketing and advertising departments.
It’s a whole massive industry that takes massive amounts of financial resources and human labour and doesn’t contribute to anyone’s wellbeing except the stockholders of the company.
Just making billboards ads illegal. It would make every city and the places in-between instantly better
Appealing idea obviously. But I think if everything else stayed the same, and suddenly ads were banned, we'd just see a lot of shady underhand tactics emerging.
There's already lots of grey areas, influencers who are supposedly just talking about things they like but have some relationship with a brand they happen to promote... Is no one ever allowed to discuss a product? Can I promote Librewolf to people? But only as long as librewolf don't give me any free swag? Do reviewers no longer get free copies of book or free screenings of movies? What if I contributed to a project, can I talk about my own work on my own channels?
The viral marketing stuff of the 90s was pretty weird. Dreadful though target online ads are, gangs of people going around the real world trying to influence word of mouth feels even more dystopian. Although, if big companies were encouraging staff to volunteer and get involved in community projects, (and giving them time off to do them) with the understanding that they'd "innocently mention" that they work at Nike, maybe that would be better than the current setup.
In the past, physical buildings often served as advertising. Lots of high end stores on shopping streets are mostly there as a physical advert for the brand, not because they particularly make a profit. Do we really want McDonald's expanding into real estate to start making building reminiscent of the golden arches in visible locations? But maybe even if these alternatives would be intrusive in new and horrible ways, they are limited by being in the real world, and thus not infinitely scalable. And if city centres are revived by brands desperate for attention, and corporations has be involved in communities on an individual employee level, instead of just sticking a logo on something, maybe that would counterbalance the bad with some good.
Thanks for the thorough comment. I'd say your assessment is accurate. As it is, McDonald's is a real estate company that also sells hamburgers. Corporations are not waiting for advertisement to be banned before they do those things. They've been doing them for a while. We should ban advertisement. The dystopia arrived a while ago.
I agree, as in many more cases it is better to regulate than it is to forbid. Companies and consumers will find a way.
Personally I've been of the opinion that advertising, at least in its current form, should be illegal since I was about 15. I'm not 100% sure if it should be completely illegal, or just very heavily regulated. Even after all those years, I'm still baffled nearly every day that people around me seem okay with current advertising.
Sao Paolo did this in 2006.
Under the cult of the "Invisible Hand of the Free Market", the prevailing ideology of neoclassical economics and the modern global economy, advertising is not necessary. Why should a firm have to convince me to buy anything if the market dictates prices and the flow of commodities? Yet here we are.
Lets try it and see what happens. No advertising seems like a reasonable response to advertising everywhere all the time.
It blew my mind when I read that snacking wasn't a thing until rather recently. In the past, there were three meals a day, if you were lucky.
Nowadays, we all are constantly told by advertising to "take a break" and stuff ourselves. Take a break from what? Sitting in an office chair? Who is really tilling the soil from dawn to dusk anymore? And then they wonder about the worldwide obesity epidemic. A big mystery, indeed.
The first use of the tagline 'Have a Break. Have a Kit Kat', written by the agency's Donald Gilles, can be traced to May 1957. A year later it was used on the first television spots for the brand and ever since has been a staple of campaigns for the chocolate bar.
I would argue that what this article is advocating for isn't a definitive end to advertisement per se. Truthfully that would be impossible.
What we truly need are iron clad privacy laws that impose unbreakable regulations with destructive fines when violated by companies and organizations.
“Online communities” are great, but how do you stop them from being infiltrated by corporate astroturfers within five minutes of creation? Doesn’t every major brand have a low-overhead keyboard farm posting social media and forum comments to make them look good?
Oh please gods yes. Advertising is violence and even though most of my life is now ad free, I still can't avoid the advertising scourge being shoved into my eyeballs every time I leave my house. It would be a blessed weight lifted from my already tired brain to never see a single ad again.
"advertising is violence" says so much about how we (the world) allow companies to behave.
"Advertising is violence???"
Anyone who says these kind of statements should be forced to watch an hour of gore.
Nobody who isn't knee deep in circle jerking leftist communities thinks you're clever. You can argue against advertising without trivializing worse things.
#YES, PLEASE.
I have been fighting advertising in my own way since the early 2000s:
It’s gotten to the point where stumbling across an ad is the mental equivalent to nails on a chalkboard.
Another part of the problem I haven't read in the comments is all the companies that rely on advertising to exist, especially media companies. Many newspapers, magazines, websites, TV channels etc would go bankrupt if they couldn't earn money with advertising. There is a simple solution because we can 'just pay them' but I'm afraid we won't. People hate advertising (someone commented "advertising is violence", that really says it all), but still many of us choose to not get the subscription but use the 'free' option instead.
I'm not against banning all advertising, but I think working towards more peaceful advertising might be fruitful. Banning advertising of tabacco products and having disclaimers when financial and medical products show this can be done.
The future is not required to contain the business models of the past. More specially, I don't believe "there are businesses that would fail" is a good argument. We need UBI or a better social safety net for the people in those businesses, but the businesses can simply fail and nothing will be lost.
That said, I think advertising can probably be reformed through a combination of removing the puffery exception, enhanced enforcement of existing truth in advertising laws, and increased civil liability for falsehoods at all layers: product (Kraft, Nestle, Tesla), production ("Mad men"),, and propagation (networks, Hulu, YT)
If the product can't exist without advertisement does it deserve to?
If a product wouldn't sell if it isn't heavily marketed I'd agree it doesn't need to exist. But if a product is paid for by advertising other products, that is a different story. Newspapers have had advertising for ages because of the high cost of running a newspaper, many tv-channels wouldn't be able to exist on a subscription basis. Same goes for a lot of websites online. Also no more free porn (not legally at least). Advertising pays for a lot of things in our society. I'm not saying this is a good thing, but this system cannot be changed overnight.
I think anything that can't exist without money from advertising either shouldn't exist, or should be subsidized by taxes, not ads.
Tricky territory when you're talking about journalism.
No doubt. And plenty of other things. Since the government doesn't actually have the best interests of it's people in mind. Bring on the AI overlords, since AI doesn't have emotional reasons to hurt us for it's own gain, maybe it will be better. Lol
Let those companies fail. A nee similar company will emerge from the ashes with a better business model that doesn’t rely on force fucking ads down your throat.
The thing is I don't think I would mind advertising if it wasn't shoved down my throat 24/7. The fact I can't read a webpage without ads blocking everything, I can't watch TV without more than half of the show's runtime being ads in and out of segments, I can't even step outside without seeing the billboard or another 5 ads shoved in my mailbox!
I get 15 some-odd emails a day from different companies trying to get me to buy things. I block them and they pop up with a different email address. I can't even open my email without ads popping up masquerading as actual messages (Gmail). Don't get me started on the entire Google app thing.
I can't open an online map without getting SPONSERED listings. And places I use the app to order from try to advertise me their own food WHILE I'M ORDERING. Panda Express started asking me if I want a subscription to Starz or whatever.
NO. NO. NO.
I'm exhausted. I want to go to a store without being immediately inundated with ads or sellers. "Buy this!" NO. LEAVE ME ALONE.
I'm overwhelmed. I'm overstimulated. I'm done. I don't care how "quirky" or "flashy" or "hip" your ads are. I refuse to buy anything I see ads for now. It's too much. Shut up.
TL;DR: we need controls and limits to who, what, where, and how things are advertised. It should be an enforcable crime to have ads louder than a certain decibel for one. But it's not enforced and fines aren't more than a drop in the bucket. I doubt I'll see it in ny lifetime.
As I sat down this morning to enjoy my warm and full-flavored Folger's coffee, it got me thinking: traditional advertising might disappear, but something sneakier would inevitably fill the void: product placement.
I don't like to buy anything I've seen advertised. I just don't trust it
As someone who had designed and attempted to sell things. On of my key takeaways has always been the lack of awareness or knowledge of my things exists.
Granted if I put a 50ft build board in the sky it wouldn’t change much. But if I did more than I did.. or am doing it would help.
I saw a metaphor in this thread comparing advertising to Smoking. But I think Sugar is a better comparison. Is it needed? No. But a little will go a long way, and some dishes wouldn’t exists without it. Add to much and it ruins the flavour of the dish and isn’t healthy for the consumer.
What is needed is balance and where everything has hyper sugar in it isn’t good for anyone. So I do we need a rethink, but eliminating it outright isn’t the solution.
Pretty dumb article if you spend more than a second thinking about this issue.
The entire historical premise that we "didn't have ads" is so fucking incorrect and reeks of appeal to nature. Yeah we didn't have tv ads but we had monarchs and elite that played the same role. How is paying of some sleezy high up salesman is different from a Google search ad? If anything the latter is more ethically apt.
I'd take democracy with ads over whatever the fuck that alternative timeline that polices "unpaid word of mouth"
Interesting concept. Over the last few decades we have seen cigarettes/vapes alcohol, small plastics etc come under scrutiny as they harm people’s health. But there are physical objects that harm physical health.
Advertising is much more subjective I tend of what constitutes harm, and mental health is again still on the back foot compared to body health.
In some places we have seen bans on cigarette adverting and even bans on cigarettes. So at a small scale it can be implemented.
I loved ads as a kid. It shaped my career, but it’s an out of control monster that needs looking at. I am growing to hate it.
Even with an adblock and the best privacy controls available, you cannot escape the effects of advertising. Article headlines will still be clickbait. Online recipes will still have long, unnecessary stories at the start. Companies will still want your email for trivial things so they can spam you. There are a hundred ways that advertising affects culture, and it's not something that can change based on individual effort.
Yes please nobody should be able to pay to force people to look at eye cancer ads
If you just made it criminal to misrepresent what you are selling then it would be progress. Any measure of truth in advertising would be a plus. None currently exist.
I get the impression that misrepresentation is banned... And that's why ads are often not about the product, but instead showing emotional images, playing catchy music (with brand-related lyrics), making related jokes. When what you can truthfully say is no better than the competition, you have to take a different approach...
Almost anything that can be remotely subjective ("best", "better", "more effective", etc.) gets pushed into the "puffery" exception of (US) truth-in-advertising laws.
Even very objective claims that are untrue can be upheld, if they are (e.g.) based on an internal study. Even if there's a better sourced, more repeated study with stronger claims (in the other direction) that is widely published. The companies involved just claim ignorance (which isn't illegal) and offer to pull that claim from future campaigns (as if that addresses any of the damage caused by the false claims). Their lawyers can file continuances until the campaigns they've already paid for are complete anyway.
So, in theory misrepresentations is banned, but it happens and is often not punished when it does.
But, yeah, current advertising is largely not about making any sort of claim; it's just telling a story the the customer and see themselves in, but is made somehow better (that real life) because the product/brand is present.
Bless your heart.
Cool idea but we live under the violent imposition of capitalism.
I’ve had adblockers on my browsers for years and pay for ad-free streaming. I easily went over a decade without seeing an ad on a screen in my own home. But when I’d go to a restaurant that had TVs (or to my mom’s house where she’d run the TV constantly) I’d marvel at how unwatchable it was. Just a constant interruption.
My wife has a friend who produced a TV series for Tubi and so we signed up to check it out and, wow. I had to tap out of watching it because of the ads. Just completely obnoxious and loud.
I refuse to watch all advertising.
That'd be nice.
I think regulation is better than abolishing it.
With most initiatives that have been made in good faith to avoid bad actors, it will usually hit the little guy the hardest.
In my country, for example, you can apply for grants for your business for developing your business. Great right? Wrong. The bureaucracy is so crazy that small businesses, whom this grant was aimed towards, cannot feasibly take the grant. It is too expensive for them to go through all the steps to get the money for the developmental aspect of the business that they would lose money as a business and not be able to recoup their losses. The grant money are so small and aren't allowed to be used to run the business at all that it simply isn't worth it to even try. You would essentially have to work for free for days or weeks in some cases to get this tiny portion that will now sink your company instead of developing it.
However, a big business with many employees and time and money to spare, could easily apply for the grant and get it without a sweat, despite them not needing it at all.
That is how I'd see a potential ban of ads affect the market. The big businesses who got to benefit from ads and marketing in the past will continue to do well because people know them while any and all new start ups and smaller businesses would drown and go bankrupt due to them not being allowed to make people aware of their business.
It is a bit too utopic for my taste to suggest a ban. But regulation would be a good thing in my opinion.
Oh what a world. But it would NEVER happen. Might as well wish for super powers.
I concur.
Some places limit advertising more than others. Banned on footpaths and dangerous spots. What about sales persons? How do you brand a product? I think it would have to be well defined.
I am ok with technical information being provided by a staff member. So much shit is peddled through marketing. As the scientist designing the product, I want to tell them the truth, customers love the truth, in this regard. I think banning deception and conning further would be a good way. And fuck this debt model of economics. And how about universities turn back into noble education organisations, not cocksucking psuedo-businesses.
I think govts/politicians like keeping the vague open because they use it, too. Their propaganda departments are cucked with good fact checking teams.
I have hated few things in this world as much as advertising. It is one of the few industries I feel is beyond saving and produces nothing of value at all levels. I am of the opinion that advertising is like cancer, whenever it is allowed to get a foothold somewhere it will eventually kill the host. For-profit companies can not resist the easy money promised by advertising, so the only way to combat it is not have it to begin with.
I go out of my way to pay for the things I use with money and not attention if at all possible. I will nearly always favor buying from a company that does not get most of their revenue from advertising, even if it means I pay more for the product and it is a less capable product or service.
OTA tv would no longer be possible, nor radio AM or FM.
Newspapers (what is left of them) would no longer be possible, neither wouild magazines.
A good deal of the internet is supported by ads too.
If you are willing to give up everything that is supported by ads, I suppose it could work.
I’m definitely in favor of a ban of advertising in public spaces. Spaces that are owned by the collective ‘us’ should remain free of it. Like public squares, roadways, public transit, etc. Those should be commercial free.
A total ban would be wildly difficult and impractical. It would also widen certain gaps like the rural-urban divide. How would someone in a rural area know an iPhone exists, if the nearest store is a hundred miles away? Or other products that might be beneficial to them?
I live in a city of 160.000 people. And even here, we simply don’t have every store or every product available. Advertising broadens that horizon considerably.
I would like meaningful regulation on advertising. Something to the effect of "STOP BLASTING MY FACE WITH ADS EVERY CHANCE YOU GET YOU SCUMFUCKERS"
There is a gas station nearby who runs non-stop unmutable (there is no mute button) ads. I don't go to that gas station anymore.
YEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSS!
This feels like I wrote it. I've hated advertising for about as long I have been aware of it but I've been telling people we should ban it since the first time I saw one of those articles about how everything was becoming clickbait because of advertising. In all that time, the ONLY thing I have ever thought of which would be a negative effect from a ban is the difficulty of getting the word out about a small business. Any other arguments are just dumb. Advertising is inherently harmful to everyone exposed to it, even the advertisers, who have to burn money to make it happen.
If only. Wouldn't that be something?
I want to live there. I can't tell you how sick I am of ads. I've seen a lifetime of advertisements and I'm done.
Actually, I think that's a good idea. Everyone already knows that banning recreational drugs only makes more people want to try them. And seeing how the legal weed system in my home state is controlled entirely by a handful of billionaires who artificially keep prices high, I think it would be a lot wiser to put legalization in the control of the common people.
What a terrible analogy.
I agree that it'd be good to out legislation in the control of the common people - but putting it in dealers' hands is just asking for new conflicts of interests, at least if it's in their hands only
I think some kind of mix approach, example some countries ban some kind of advertising. Advertising medical prescription drugs and treatments is illegal in some countries.
Alternatively companies should pay me to watch their advertisements. Organize events to pay people to watch their advertisement.
With smart glasses AR and AI we should be able to block out all billboard, posters or it could go the opposite way glasses show all kind of adverts.. hmm. We need open source AR smart glasses with adblock.
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.
I highly doubt most ads are being run at a loss. The whole point is to generate sales and increase revenue. If ads continue to persist then they are likely doing the job. Lemmy is overwhelmingly on the same page about how we feel about ads and adblockers, but the majority of the internet's users do not. IOS users don't have adblockers on their devices. Anyone who uses a chromium browser doesn't either. Most people really just don't care. I had a roommate that told me he actually likes having ads because he learns about products he didn't know he needed! My first thought was "if you don't know about it, you don't need it", but I really don't think most people think that way. There are a lot of subtle tricks advertisers use to get viewers to think of their products/services long after the ad was seen. I think most ads are very effective at making money.
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.
I have existed totally ad free for a few years now. I use a whitelist DNS filter.
before ads we need to get rid of political campaigning.
What do you mean by campaigning? Do you mean no political ads or PACs then yeah definitely agree. But if you mean all forms of campaigning then how are politicians supposed to communicate who they are and why you should vote for them to the people? And outside of politicians if political campaigning is not allowed would that also not allow grass roots movements who door knock or hold rallys about specific issues? Political campaigning is all of those things, I definitely agree we need to get big money out of it but I don't think it should be gotten rid of all together.
Almost all forms of political campaigns. I think every candidate should be given some modest and equal amount of TV time (in a channel that is specially dedicated to this) to explain their ideology and plans for their next term and allowed to distribute one type of written booklet to communicate it and then that is it. The second you allow more than this money starts having a huge influence on results. Of course this still does not prevent huge amounts of billionaire owned social media and news outlets for disinformation campaigns so this would only be a start.
I mean I think if anything that makes it worse and easier for billionaires to control the narrative as now politicians can't campaign for themselves which means in practice most people are gonna hear about politicians from billionaire owned media. Especially for more worker centered causes which right now tend to be championed by door knocking and more grass roots campaigning. I personally think just abolishing PACs and limiting campaign donations would be enough to make it so politicians have to actually appeal and listen to the people rather then the rich. Could also combine this with a government provider donation that you can choose whichever candidate you want to receive it to help people without the means to donate to be appealed to as well. But I feel like the moment you outlaw campaigning then how do you advocate for ballot measures you like at the state level of you can't go out and door knock or hold rallies for it? As much as the one TV channel style thing would be an ideal idea it wouldn't really work in reality as we already have a channel for that, C-Span, which covers government related things which no one really watches. You have to meet people where they are, and I think trying to stop that is a bad idea for getting people involved in the political process which is something we need more of.
Same thing. Include those under the same law and solve both problems at once. 💛
The best way to make advertising uninteresting or useless is to provide an alternative form of making money. If the default way to monetise a website, video, or whatever is ads, then ads will continue to be used. If we actually had an alternative that was as or more lucrative, that's what would be used.
"Ban it" also means you need a way to enforce it, and even if it were banned in one country, that's just one country. They might finally come up with an alternative, but why wait for a ban? Why not discuss and test alternatives here instead of just dreaming that a solution magically shows up?
Let’s ban all persuasive advertising! No reason not to let people make a list of features or something, like a notification, but that’s it.
Sure it should og course be legal to provide information, but banning ads is fine by me!
No, advertising is useful to small businesses and big. What needs to happen, is actual thoughtful regulation, as with everything else.
My idea: no company or person can spend more than 100 dollars on ads per year, nor can any company or person earn more than 100 dollars from advertising.
Isn't the problem with banning ads that you'd just gets "ads" that aren't marked as such? Like, ads are still going to happen, they just won't be clearly marked cause that would be illegal.
EDIT: Would love to hear how the downvoters would enforce an advertisement ban. What happens when an influencer randomly endorses a brand and then that brand also just coincidentally happens to give the influencer a "generous donation" or perhaps a life-time usage coupon?
yeah basically the word of mouth and community networks will become ads and you will get things like leave five stars and get some shit with tell your friends and get some shit.
How exactly do you define advertising? An overly broad definition would forbid, for example, a dentist from putting a sign in front of their office saying they're a dentist.
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.
Advertising has grown into a monster. It's pervasive. You seem to be defending the concept a lot, do you work in advertising? maybe you have better ideas as to how it should change to better address the problem the article charges advertising with.
Are you dense? Just look them up lol
You must be in marketing. Go watch a Bill Hicks video, thanks.
Advertising is when they’re getting paid for it. Otherwise it’s called recommending.
Congratulations! You've just reinvented MLMs!
If you want to split hairs, manipulative advertising is what people are talking about, and I'm sure you know that.
I don't get a lot of ads already, and I could honestly use more in terms of new games and movies coming out. Word of mouth doesn't work great for obscure things either.
I see advertising as a necessary evil. It helps small businesses take off and stay afloat (especially when alternatives for being funded aren't viable for them), but at the same time it basically promotes corporate greed by shoving ads down our throats.
Abolishing advertising entirely would be improbable. I just want it to be toned down to the point where we're all comfortable with it. Too much of a good thing inevitably becomes a bad thing. But too little of a good thing is also a bad thing. So things should be taken in moderation. In the case of advertising, the first statement applies; there's way too much of it, it's really in-your-face and disruptive, and we're all getting sick of it.
As much as I'd be down with this I don't see it happening considering no one wants to pay for the services they use that are ad supported. For example everyone always seems to shit on YouTube premium but that is a currently existing way to get rid of ads on the service. Every time there's an option between ad supported and ad free but paid people tend to just pick ad free. So while I think outlawing ads would be good at least with the current state of the world it would only be a net negative, killing off a bunch of small and big websites that rely on ads.
Youtube spends a tiny fraction of its revenue on bandwidth. It gets way more than it needs from ads and premium subscriptions. Hardly any of that revenue goes to the content creators either.
I generally agree but I think you have to acknowledge if you got rid of ads then best case scenario YouTube either limits more features like uploading or HD video behind paying or worst case scenario the platform collapses and there is nothing to replace it. For the longest time they weren't profitable and it wasn't until they pushed hard with ads and premium that they started to be profitable. So as much as I wish we could get rid of ads unless you wanna accept moving back technologically and losing a bunch of these online services people rely on I think ads are a needed evil for the time being. Especially when a lot of services already have ways to pay to get around ads. As at the end of the day if you don't have ads you're gonna have a subscription you have to pay for every major website you wanna use as they have to make money some way.
My internet connection would sure improve if they got rid of HD.
There were ads in ancient Rome, just to show how deep the rot goes.
considering tons of free services are paid for with advertising, a lot of such services would cease to exist/be free.
be it websites such as youtube and streaming sites like twitch, or almost any website for that matter.
someone made a brand of water thats free and is entirely paid by advertising printed on the bottle, that would be gone too.
hell, i hate ads, but considering i use ublock, i havent seen any in years, and in real life you can just not look at them.
I'm sure they would change their business model with some free watching hours to lure you in, and then once they become valuable to you, you have to pay to continue watching. Or something like that.
Ultimately some ads will become illegal as legit advertisers (large corps), get pissed off at all the dick pill ads mixed in with their content.
Those who take issue with loss of profits without ads must take it up with big tech. They've have literal trillions of dollars from dominating the ad industry. They have your money. Nobody else.
I am kinda for it, but kinda against it because I like this 35% off coupon for weed in the bay area I get in the local ad magazine. I save so much fucking money with that coupon I love it
I think the problem is that it just moves. You can never get rid of it completely. people will be paid to word of mouth. Like look at all the "influencer" content that is just commercials. Your going to make a law that they can't say they are using a certain product in their makeup tutorial?
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.
Tons of companies rely on ad revenue. Netflix, Google etc will go under.
then you would have illegal advertising edit: people giving down votes as if i am wrong. lmaoing @ u all
Advertising is too big of an industry to ever be banned. It also keeps lots of other sectors on life support, like sports and free online content. It's also extremely important to keep services like search engines free. Unless we transition away from capitalism ads are pretty much mandatory to keep the economy afloat. I agree they suck though. uBlock Origin until I die.
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
Price lists / labels at the point of sale are not advertising. Unpaid word of mouth is not commercial advertising. You don't seem to be following the thread very well.
Nah that's silly and how would that even be enforced? "Unpaind word of mouth" - you going to interrogate people how they know something? Are we going back to monarchies where your product only succeeds with kings blessing?
The whole original post comes off like it's written by an angry teenager with no real world understanding and I'm genuinely surprised people are taking it so seriously here.
There's a way to address advertising damage through things like banning public square ads, TV ads - using a scalpel instead of you know just hammering it down some absurd imaginary scenario.
You would investigate if there's a complaint or other probable cause, just like every other crime. Some people will get away with breaking the law, maybe, but as long as the law can be enforced effectively but not arbitrarily it's not a bad law on enforcement grounds.
I am on record elsewhere stating that I believe there are better approaches than banning advertisement wholesale, yes. But, I'm not going to let the better be the enemy of the good while I'm living in the bad. An improvement of the status quo, even if it might be in the "wrong direction" is still an improvement.
Nah this absolutely make no sense to anyone who's been alive for more than a day. Prohibition doesn't work without a path to reliable enforcement and its straigh up impossible to enforce whatever garbage this "proposal" is.
It's completely uneforcable drivel to the point where any further discussion here is clearly not going anywhere so we can agree to disagree.
It makes sense to me. I have been alive in excess of 10k days.
Not true, I provided a mechanism for enforcement. We investigate perjury all the time, and the test for "unpaid" would be significantly similar.
I'd support a ban on advertising in public spaces, but in digital spaces its a bit nonsense given it funds a lot of things people then dont need to pay for.
It's necessary for monopoly capitalism to induce demand. It's part of the planned economy.
Then we’d have a centrally-planned economy I guess. I don’t really see how a free market would work without advertising.
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.
The word "new" is a relative term. Humans evolved around 300,000 BCE, and ancient Rome (founded in 753 BCE) is pretty "new" by that metric. You're not wrong that people found ways to "advertise" to each other throughout recorded history, but when it comes to prehistory (or as the article states, "99.9% of [humanity's] existence"), life was very different. There can't have been much to advertise before people developed tradable goods.
With that said, I'm intrigued by your comprehensive interpretation of "advertising." Now I'm wondering about things that would not have been written down/recorded, like things a town crier might have been incentivized to add to their announcements.
"Hear ye, hear ye! A joust is to be held tomorrow evening in the royal courtyard, in the King's honor. Sir and Lady Abbington announce the birth of their new son, to be baptized at the Lord's church this Saturday. In celebration, Mavis the Fishmonger is offering a buy-one-get-one deal on all flounder! Come on down to the market square for fantastic deals on all your seafood goods - just look for the stall with the yellow awning. Get your catch of the day at Mavis's!"
Haha! New is a relative term but really? 300k BCE? Reverting to pre organised society to avoid advertising?
Maybe we should go to pre human times, oh wait, walk through a forest and all you see is flowers advertising themselves to insects and birds advertising their singing abilities to each other.
So long as there’s competition for resources and attention plays a role in that distribution something will find a way to attract that attention.
I didn't reach to find that era - it was referenced from the article, even the snippet at the top of this very page:
Then you provided examples that occured within the most recent .1% sliver of humanity's existence. Anything more recent than ~30,000 BCE is within that .1% time frame. Ergo, Ancient Rome doesn't count.
This is why it's important to define terms before beginning debates. The advertising people are referencing here is the modern kind targeted at humans in order to manipulate them. To compare that to the symbiotic relationships between flowers and their pollinators, or to animals seeking a mate, (both scenarios that benefit all parties mutually) is a false equivalence.
Anyway, I tried to keep things light-hearted in that last post, to show that I'm not looking to attack anyone. I gave you credit for providing a novel viewpoint, in an effort to build conversation. But I'm getting the impression that you're not arguing in good faith. If you'd like have a real discussion, cool, I'm in. But if you're looking for an argument, I recommend you look elsewhere.
Sorry, it was not my intent to offend, I’m never looking for an argument - just look at my post history.
I got that you gave credit for what you found novel, and cracked a couple of jokes which were quite amusing, even though I wasn’t sure if you were actually considering them as possibilities or just having fun but even without that part it I would just have answered on the merits of your position without argument.
I don’t usually share laughs with people I argue with and I started my reply with a laugh to show that I’m sharing your willingness to argue in good faith. Maybe it came across mean spirited.
I’m really confused about what part of my reply was confrontational. I get that most of the conversation’s content is usually non verbal so perhaps you read it in a confrontational tone that was not intended - it was more ribbing or amused incredulousness in the spirited discussion intent and not at all “how dare you” or yelling.
Now on to the merits of the discussion:
Look, pulling Ancient Rome and churches and flowers and birds as an examples has a common thread, and that is to argue my conclusion in the last comment. That in any environment of competition for resources were attention plays a role in their distribution you’ll find advertising.
If the examples from recorded human history are to be cast aside as too soon then what about pre human examples from nature.
That was the crux.
Now you find the floral and animal examples as irrelevant because you make a claim that they are symbiotic so they benefit both parties - but I don’t find that convincing as there are not just two parties, or only those examples and also that was not the point.
The point is the competition for resources where attention plays a role in the distribution and how advertising emerges between competitors and the audience that will provide them with the desired resource or the means for it.
Whether it is to the benefit or the detriment of the receiver or an unsuccessful advertiser that is not very relevant. After all not all human advertising is detrimental, most is symbiotic. Buying this pack of chewing gums vs another or none, or this mouse trap or spending your time listening to one genre of music vs another doesn’t necessarily hurt you and might even benefit you in some way.
But a more apt comparison if you want the yard stick to be non beneficial advertising are the million ways that advertising in nature has ill intent - leading one of the parties to their demise: from Venus flowers, to angler fish, to camouflage, to fake mating calls, to fake food and hundreds of other examples.
Current forms yes for sure, as most of our current communication methods are new.
But advertising in general? That simply cannot be true. Yes the earliest examples we can find are from early human civilisations a fraction of the estimated age of humanity (however you want to define it, but let’s say Homo sapiens) but if you want to argue that…
…Modern brained humans were not trying to manipulate other humans in non mutually beneficial ways, either with whatever form of communication was available or with other traps when nature does it at its most basic forms and when I see little kids do it to each other from a very young age then the onus of the argument requires to either explain in detail how are humans not a part of a nature where this naturally emerges or what a society without advertising actually looks like.
It’s a bit late over here so let’s hope my rumbling is somewhat coherent.
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).
No shit. I don't think anybody wants to ban any of your examples. It's the 99.9% as you said that's being discussed here. Of course the ruling would have to be clear. That's true of all such rulings. And of course businesses will try to skirt the law, because that's always the case with businesses.
Ideally, I'd love for it to work, but realistically it would devastate the current ecosystem if implemented naively.
You'd put a lot of people out of work.
all business would fail.
This is where I stopped reading the article. It's such a red-flag.
What I was thinking up to that point, though, was
I'm sure we could brainstorm one or two more thin positives that ads provide, but those are weak enough already. Just, non-zero.
Ngl, this is a weak ass argument. Nearly all ads are trash and just get ignored. The ad industry has caused more problems than anything specifically/especially with privacy. There is some validity to ads in the sense that it does make it easier to find new products. I would be fine with ads (to a reasonable extent) in stores to show new products they carry. But the “good” ads (one that actually provide any kind of useful information) are way overshadowed by the bad ads. Its just time to cut the balls of this monster. Im sick of AI generated ads especially. I see them on youtube a lot as youtube will let just about anybody or anything to drop an ad on their website.
Guys, you wouldn’t find anything good if it wasn’t for good marketing you all got the attention span of a gold fish.
That's not how it worked before advertising was even a thing. People still found good services and the better services got better word of mouth, all for free.