What if we made advertising illegal?

Advertising is a broad thing, which may include:

- Job offers

- Jobseeking

- Dating

- Public service announcements

- Word-of-mouth

- Sponsoring

- Political campaigns

- Fundraisers

- Endorsements

- Recommendations

And many others

If you ban all forms of advertising, society will grind to a halt, even before considering free speech. How can a business be successful if no one knows that it exists? Advertising connects people who need something to people who provide it. It absolutely essential to society and in a sense, it predates humans, if we consider mating as a form of advertising, like peacocks using their tails as some kind of a biological billboard.

I understand what the author means, he is annoyed by ad breaks, banners, and tracking, we all are, and he would like to see less of them, we all do, except whoever makes money over these banners that is.

The author suggests banning paid-for advertisement. But how far will it go? For example, you want to print flyers to promote your business. Is it illegal for the print shop to print your flyers, as they are making money on advertising. Classified ads will become illegal too, forget about craigslist and the likes.

It kinds of remind me of some "abolitionist" laws on prostitution that some countries have. Prostitution is legal, based on the idea that people own their bodies and people have the right to have sex, but everything surrounding prostitution is not, including advertising and pimping. The definition for pimping can go far, for example renting a room to a prostitute can be considered pimping. The idea is essentially to make prostitution illegal without writing it explicitly. A blanket ban on advertising will do that, but for all businesses.

As always, for every complex problem there is a solution which is clear, simple and wrong.

It's deductible?

Put this way I almost think we should ban anything that makes “people into the product”

YOU can.

As someone who's worked in marketing for 15 years - across big agencies in New York and running growth for startups - there's an uncomfortable truth to this piece. The industry has quietly become something darker than when I joined.

Modern advertising doesn't just sell products, it sells our own attention back to us at a premium. What started as "connecting products to people who need them" has warped into engineering digital environments that hack our baseline neurological responses.

The most disturbing part is that most people inside the machine know it. I've sat in rooms where we've explicitly designed systems to maximize "time on site" by exploiting cognitive vulnerabilities. The language we use internally is more clinical than predatory, which makes it easy to avoid moral questions.

What's wild is how this piece frames advertising as a relatively recent phenomenon. It's right - for 99% of human history, we made purchasing decisions based on community knowledge and direct information, not carefully engineered psychological triggers that follow us around.

Sure, banning all advertising sounds extreme, but it's worth asking: what would we actually lose? Product information would still exist. Reviews would still exist. Word-of-mouth would still exist. We'd just lose the sophisticated machinery designed to bypass our rational decision-making.

The "free speech" counter-argument has always struck me as disingenuous. Nobody believes they have a constitutional right to interrupt your dinner with a telemarketing call.