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What if we made advertising illegal?

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Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#271

Post by LunaSea »

gcp123 wrote: post #262

I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry. The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings p…

> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen.

But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#272

Post by thfuran »

mnky9800n wrote: post #170
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…

What about just restrict it to advertising on the internet? The internet is supposed to be an information retrieval tool. Advertising’s whole goal is to stand between you and the information you actually want. And it does so by trying to anticipate instead of the thing you want, the thing you are most willing to buy next, whether that’s actual products with money or propaganda. Whereas an ad in a magazine about compu…

>What about just restrict it to advertising on the internet?

Why? I don't see the difference between a webpage and the magazine here, except that I guess you're assuming the webpage must be showing an unrelated ad.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#273

Post by barbazoo »

Animats wrote: post #205

Sao Paulo, Brazil, made outdoor advertising illegal. That worked out quite well. The US used to forbid prescription drug advertising. That seemed to work. Ads for liquor, marijuana, and gambling are prohibited in many jurisdictions. The FCC once limited the number of minutes of ads per hour on the public airwaves. That limit was below 10% of air time in the 1960s. The SEC used to limit ads for financial products to d…

That idea about taxation is interesting, I’ve never considered that angle.

It would be very unpopular with the people I’d imagine.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#275

Post by Henchman21 »

LunaSea wrote: post #271
gcp123 wrote: post #262

I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry. The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings p…

> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out.

Very little of value would be lost.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#276

Post by immibis »

LunaSea wrote: post #271
gcp123 wrote: post #262

I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry. The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings p…

> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out.

Is that such a bad thing? Are they really providing that much value?

The remaining YouTube channels would be concentrated around the ones that are of higher quality, rather than easy slop produced to push ads. Nobody would try to clone someone else's channel for money. They would only be produced by people who were passionate about that topic. There would be fewer channels by passionate people, but the percentage would be much higher, so it's not necessarily a worse situation overall.

TV has always cost money - you pay for satellite or cable, and the free-to-air programming available to you is overtly subsidized by your government - they shouldn't need to double-dip by showing ads.

We used to pay for newspaper subscriptions too. A lot of newspapers are trying to go back to that, but it's a market for lemons. Maybe if advertising was banned, we'd each subscribe to one or two online newspapers and discover which ones are decent and which ones are crap. Remember, it's harder to make someone who was paying $0.00 pay $0.01, than to make someone who was paying $10 pay $20. Would the market be more efficient at price discovery if there was no $0.00 at all?

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#277

Post by glacier5674 »

titaphraz wrote: post #236

A start would be banning of misleading statements and half-truths. A panel of randomly selected 100 people will be the judge and jury.

What's the threshold they have to meet to ban? Half of them, give or take, will probably not be able to recognize the lie, and a sizeable portion of them would likely not be convinced in deliberation. It's also subject to nullification, e.g. "I know it's a lie, but it 'owns' the people I don't like"

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#279

Post by pseufaux »

LunaSea wrote: post #271
gcp123 wrote: post #262

I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry. The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings p…

> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. But newspapers, TV and Youtube would die out.

TV and YouTube would definitely suffer. Not sure if that's an issue or benefit. But I'm not sure newspapers or journalism would be so bad. My expectation would be that people would still need/want information from somewhere might begin paying to get it.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#280

Post by nofalsescotsman »

gcp123 wrote: post #262

I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry. The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings p…

Treating the symptoms is easier and cheaper. And let's be real, the money would rather treat symptoms than the cause. Convincing monied interests to stop advertising is not a realistic thing. This would have to be done through legislation and force. And I agree it should be done.
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