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What if we made advertising illegal?

simone.org

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Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#501
How will a new business promote its product if advertising is banned ?

Thinking from a small business perspective, advertising is the only way to find consumers if you are just getting started.

Business stop advertising. Sales drop. People lose job.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#502
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 cas…

Agree with this entirely. In fact, I would go as far as saying if advertising was illegal, then expressing opinions would be illegal. Everything is an advertisement.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#503
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’d draw the line at publishers.

Are you a publisher (ie responsible for every single thing that appears on your platform)? You can show advertising. Otherwise no.

I know this isn’t in the spirit of the article, but I like the idea of a ad-spaces and ad-free spaces.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cas…

There's two kinds of advertising: your local mom and pop running a labor day sale in the local paper, and megacorps spending billions of dollars advertising soda and roblock lootcrates or whatever to kids, or plastering every square inch of public and private space with maximally attention-seeking posters and billboards. One of these is good and one is bad.

That's the tough part - drawing precise line. There's lots of points between megacorps and local mnps.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cas…

As a fantasy it sounds nice but it immediately hits the wall of the 1st amendment.

Amplified messaging from corporations is not the same as the free speech of individuals. Just as we disallow advertising for cigarettes and hard liquor on TV, a democratic society should be free to select other classes of messages that corporations are not permitted to amplify into public spaces.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#507
If you are a new company starting out (suppose aluminum siding), you have to market your product or else nobody will know about it. I'm not sure what all parts of marketing are counted as advertising here, but generally in marketing you pay to get word out about your product. Wihtout that, starting a business might be tough. And then, as a consumer, there are lots of free products I have gotten my entire life by virtue of the fact that one of those companies offered to pay for it for me. If you turn that off I'm not sure how that all would work. I don't think the OP goes into too much detail.
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