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What if we made advertising illegal?

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Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#351

Post by Enginerrrd »

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.

I don't know. I would GLADLY pay for ad-free youtube if the price were set at what they'd otherwise make on ads for me. In which case, that'd be about $3.50/month.

Instead they want to price-gouge me for 5x that so... no thanks. I'll just use my ad blocker.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#352

Post by kragen »

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…

It's not a well-enough-thought-out proposal to call "radical"; it assumes that making advertising illegal would make advertising go away and that there would be no drawbacks to this. Even if we all agree that it's bad for people to say things they're paid to say instead of what they really believe, there are many possible approaches to writing specific laws to diminish that practice. Those approaches represent different tradeoffs. You can't say anything nontrivial about the whole broad set of possible policy proposals.

To me it sounds a lot like "What if we made drugs illegal?"

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#353

Post by parkaboy »

cauch wrote: post #337
LunaSea wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Advertisement get the source money from the viewers, it does not create any money in itself. So, if advertisement is banned, people will have more money, and this money can be used to finance what they want to consume. This is something that I still struggle to wrap my head around: if a company is paying X$ for advertisement, it means that people subjected to this advertisement will give Y$ to this company that they…

Even if it seems like everyone is saying this, it's just statistically not true / in the aggregate, at least in the context of direct online ads. Otherwise the direct ad industry would be totally dead (ad performance is measured to death by companies).

Conversion (getting someone to purchase) at scale with ads is not so simple as person sees ad, clicks, and buys. There are many steps along the funnel and sometimes ads can be used in concert with other channels (influencer content, sponsored news articles, etc). Within direct ads you typically have multiple steps depending on how cold or warm (e.g. have they seen or interacted with your content previously) the lead is when viewing the ad and you tailor the ad content accordingly to try to keep pushing the person down the funnel.

Generally if you know your customer persona well and have good so-called product-market-fit, then (1) you will be able to build a funnel that works at scale. So then (2) the question is does the cost to convert a customer / CAC fit within the profit margin, which is much more difficult to unpack.

However, it's worth keeping in mind that digital ad costs are essentially invented by the ad platform. There is a market-type of force. If digital ads become less effective and the CAC goes too high across an industry/sector, the platform may be forced to reduce the cost to deliver ads if the channel just doesn't make enough financial sense for enough businesses.

All this is to say, the system does/can work. Tends to work better for large established companies or startups with lots of funding. In general, not a suggested approach as a first channel for a small startup/small business. Building up effective funnels is incredibly expensive and takes a lot of time in my depressing personal experience.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#354

Post by agnishom »

[Slavery is immoral] is a corollary of the principle that [human autonomy is sacred]. It is not very farfetched to have the moral principle that [human attention is sacred]. If we take this principle seriously, a large number of manipulative dark patterns would be considered wildly unethical.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#356

Post by kodt »

imiric wrote: post #127
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…

We don't need to go into absurd discussions in order to prevent 99% of the harm that comes from modern advertising. The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising. Someone I know mentioning a product because they want to recommend it to me? Not advertising. Giving out "free" samples? Presumably someone is being paid to do that, so advertising. We can later quibble about…

Well money must be exchanged to put up a sign outside of your business. Therefore it would be illegal.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#357

Post by nmstoker »

Nice idea but so utterly unenforceable. If you want to look at challenges around regulating advertising, the ASA in the UK is an interesting case, as when being set up in the 60s, they foresaw many of the difficulties and structured themselves to minimise them. If you're overly specific, people look for loopholes, so they focused on the spirit and they also went with a strong element of self-regulation whilst still having teeth where necessary. Even so, in the modern world, the internet spanning jurisdictions makes it all very hard to deal with.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#358

Post by Ferret7446 »

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…

> imagine a world without advertising

I can't because a world with magic and world peace is more realistic and believable.

It's impossible. How do you even define advertising? If you define it conservatively, then advertising will skirt through the loopholes. If you define it liberally, then you have an unfair, authoritarian system that will definitely be selectively enforced against political enemies.

And in all cases, you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#360

Post by al_borland »

willsmith72 wrote: post #350

But why? The whole premise seems wrong. > The financial incentives to create addictive digital content would instantly disappear No they wouldn't.. the business model would change. Facebook sells ads to businesses and entertainment to consumers. People still want to be entertained. What about the positive effects from advertising? Many products which I never knew existed have gone on to improve my life. To kill addic…

I would be OK with the death of using user data to hyper target ads to people. I think they can be targeted enough based on context, such as a fishing blog having ads for fishing stuff. Modern advertising by the likes of Google and Facebook has too much information, to the point where it can manipulate and target people directly, as they can do with their algorithmic feeds as well.
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