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What if we made advertising illegal?

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Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#131

Post by OJFord »

toomim wrote: post #10

This begs the question: how could you reliably distinguish advertising from other forms of free speech? The courts already distinguish "commercial speech" as a class of speech. Would we prevent all forms of commercial speech? What about a waiter asking you "would you like to try a rosé with that dish? It pairs very well together." Is that "advertising" that would need to be outlawed? What about giving out free sample…

I would propose 'unsolicited salesmanship'.

If I enter your restaurant, car dealership, etc. then you can pitch & try to up-sell your goods and services to me.

If I drive down a motorway or use your website, third-parties can't advertise their goods and services at me from spots you've sold them. (But you can tell me it will be faster to exit onto your toll road or that I should buy or upgrade my membership plan on the site.)

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#132

Post by tsss »

toomim wrote: post #10

This begs the question: how could you reliably distinguish advertising from other forms of free speech? The courts already distinguish "commercial speech" as a class of speech. Would we prevent all forms of commercial speech? What about a waiter asking you "would you like to try a rosé with that dish? It pairs very well together." Is that "advertising" that would need to be outlawed? What about giving out free sample…

Most things that people post online, voluntarily, is essentially advertising of one form or another.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#133

Post by jdietrich »

lukev wrote: post #40
hedayet wrote: post #14

Advertising has consequences, and I’m not a big fan of it, but it’s also a necessary evil. It’s easy to dismiss advertising as just a profit engine for ad platforms, but that’s only part of the picture. At its best, advertising plays a meaningful role in solution and product discovery, especially for new or niche offerings that users wouldn’t encounter otherwise. It also promotes fairer market competition by giving s…

I disagree. Advertising is a zero-sum game. If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth. It's only when some actors start advertising that the others must as well, so they don't fall behind. And so billions of dollars are spent that could have gone to making better products. It's basically the prisoner's dilemma at scale.

>If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth.

Most consumers don't do extensive research before making a purchasing decision, or any research at all - they buy whatever catches their eye on a store shelf or the front page of Amazon search results, they buy what they're already familiar with, they buy what they see everyone else buying. Consumer behaviour is deeply habitual and it takes enormous effort to convince most consumers to change their habits. Advertising is arguably the best tool we have for changing consumer behaviour, which is precisely why so much money is spent on it.

Banning advertising only further concentrates the power of incumbents - the major retailers who decide which products get prime shelf position or the first page of search results, and the established brands with name recognition and ubiquitous distribution. Consumers go on buying the things they've always bought and are never presented with a reason to try something different.

A market without advertising isn't a level playing field, but a near-unbreakable oligopoly.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#134

Post by gmoot »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #21
hedayet wrote: post #14

Advertising has consequences, and I’m not a big fan of it, but it’s also a necessary evil. It’s easy to dismiss advertising as just a profit engine for ad platforms, but that’s only part of the picture. At its best, advertising plays a meaningful role in solution and product discovery, especially for new or niche offerings that users wouldn’t encounter otherwise. It also promotes fairer market competition by giving s…

> Advertising has consequences, and I’m not a big fan of it—but it’s also a necessary evil. At one time, definitely. Now though? We all carry around all of humanity's collective knowledge in our pockets. If you need a solution to a problem you have, if you need a plumber, if you need a new car... you an get unlimited information for the asking. I don't remember the last time I responded to an advertisement. If I need…

Your access to all of that collective knowledge is funded by ad revenue.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#135

Post by dr_dshiv »

WalterBright wrote: post #25

Who is going to know about your product if you cannot advertise it?

I guess the idea is to ban certain types of advertising. It’s a fun thought experiment and practical — it’s why some country roads don’t have billboards and some do.

Going to a conference to promote your product to participants..

Do you allow the shills to shill?

Well, shills gonna shill— I sure wish I promoted my businesses more. It is uncomfortable at times but that’s not really a good excuse to not promote what you know to be good.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#136

Post by Veserv »

The problem is that, as the article mentions, there are "good" forms of advertising that are actually meant to inform people. Unfortunately the overwhelming majority, and even more so in "high-end" advertising, is not that. So, the question is how can we distinguish the good from the bad?

One of the key distinguishing factors is that "bad" advertising is intentionally deceptive. The explicit objective is how to overstate colloquially while technically saying something that is not untrue if interpreted by a genie or monkey's paw. Advertisers run war rooms and focus groups to make sure that the message they are promoting is verifiably and scientifically misinterpreted by the target audience while having legal review so that if it comes to court they can say: "Technically, your honor..." we meant something different than what we explicitly and intentionally aimed for.

The standard is backwards. The more money you spend on advertising, the more intentionally truthful it should be. You should run focus groups to verify that the message is not misinterpreted to your benefit the larger the advertising campaign. When you go to court and say: "Technically, your honor..." you should immediately lose (after reaching certain scales of advertising where you can be expected to have the resources to review your statements). Misinterpretation should be a honest surprise occurring despite your best efforts, not because of them and the litmus test should be if your efforts were reasonable at your scale to avoid such defective speech.

The standard is trivially assessable in court: Present the message to the target audience and ask them their interpretation. Compare it to the claims of deception. If the lawyer says: "Technically, your honor..." they lose. However, they can present evidence that they made reasonable efforts to avoid misinterpretation and that the specific form of the misinterpretation is unlikely or unexpected.

The standard is easily achieved by businesses. Make intentionally truthful claims and have your advertising teams check and test for misinterpretation. Err on the side of caution and do not overstate your claims to your benefit and the potential detriment of your customers. If you think "technically speaking", you are on the wrong track. If you would not tell that candidly to your relatives or friends, you should probably stop.

It is not like people do not know they are being deceptive, they just need to be held to it.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#137

Post by SecretDreams »

thfuran wrote: post #31
SecretDreams wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sign me up for a monthly internet pass. Shit, bake it into my monthly internet access fee and make it so the service providers then pay back into internet infrastructure. Just like we do for radio and TV. I'd love to see the internet become relatively non profit, instead of the current for-profit, for absolutely shit model we are living in.

>I'd love to see the internet become relatively non profit The stocks haven't gone down enough for your liking?

They've gone down mostly for terrible reasons. I could at least accept lower stock prices for a better internet for me and my kids. Much like housing prices, haha.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#138

Post by bigstrat2003 »

kcatskcolbdi wrote: post #59
bofadeez wrote: post #15

This is free speech. It's not open for discussion. Our right to free speech is not granted by anyone's consent or by government decree. It preexists the state and cannot be taken away. We hold this truth to be self-evident. We are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights. If any government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.

Of course it's open for discussion. Free speech is not limitless. You can wax poetically all you want about endowment by the creator, but try saying racial slurs on daytime TV and see how long that lasts. Advertisement is just another form of speech that can be limited.

> You can wax poetically all you want about endowment by the creator, but try saying racial slurs on daytime TV and see how long that lasts.

You're conflating two senses of "free speech". Free speech is an ideal, which our society does not fully reach (as you correctly pointed out). But in the US, "free speech" is also sometimes used to refer to the legal protection from the first amendment. And in your example, that does apply. I can say all the racial slurs I want on TV, and it would be quite illegal to put me in jail for it.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#139

Post by renewiltord »

lukev wrote: post #51
SteveNuts wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There must be a reason someone hasn't invented a browser plugin for microtransactions on the internet? I'll gladly pay 25 cents to read an article from a news website, but I won't subscribe for a whole year for $25+, especially when there's dozens/hundreds of sites. Obviously credit card transaction fees would be a problem, but that could be mitigated by depositing say $15 at a time and deducting from the balance eac…

This is the great white whale of the internet. A platform for this would clearly be a thing of value, but extremely difficult to do because you need to booststrap a two-sided market in an environment where all the existing established players are incentivized NOT to participate.

Blendle did exactly this, actually. With similar pricing. For many years. It generates very little money but maybe that’s because German/Dutch news isn’t valuable.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#140

Post by mathattack »

ambicapter wrote: post #120
mathattack wrote: post #103

I like open questions like this. It forces us to think from first principles, and potentially tackle consequences. One problem that would come up… It would be very hard to get word out of new (better) products. If you have a great product that doesn’t lend itself to word of mouth, how will anyone know if you can’t advertise?

What does “doesn’t lend itself to word of mouth” mean? Products you can’t speak about?

There are products people are either embarrassed to admit they need (many health care examples) or just don’t want to share for competitive reasons (a better parts supplier, or perhaps even a good SAT tutoring service).
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