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What if we made advertising illegal?

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Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#551

Post by naasking »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #358
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 cas…

> you are self-imposing a restriction that will give other nations an economic advantage and jeopardizing long-term sovereignty.

I don't see how you reached this conclusion, unless you think advertising/propaganda yields bet positive outcomes more than net negative, which seems contentious.

Here's one way it could be false: the wisdom of the crowds only really works when groups of people independently reach their own conclusions, because people who don't understand an issue are randomly distributed around the correct answer and so they all cancel each other out, leaving only the people who do understand an issue to cluster around the correct decision.

Propaganda/advertising works directly against this, thus undercutting the usefulness of the wisdom of crowds.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#552

Post by 627467 »

You know what is an example of propaganda/advertising? Peta, extinction rebellion et al antics. Marching for right to bear arms. Standing outside of Tesla dealers dissuading shoppers. Militancy, activism in general. At this stage of society I too think having less of any of this is good. It's a shame there's no ad blockers for militancy. The chance to achieve consensus on this is 0, so we will be left with propaganda to try to shift public opinion towards censuring one militancy over another

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#553

Post by card_zero »

numpad0 wrote: post #326
imiric wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm wondering if it's possible that the reality might be working the other way around than perceived. Could there be steaming can of worms that modern rampant commercial advertising is venting and holding down? Studio Ghibli made ~$220m on Spirited Away . What if they made $2.2T, is the quality going to go up, or down? And, would there be less ads, if no one made even $2.2 on them?

You're presenting an idea here by means of a lot of implicit leaps, and I don't even know where I'm supposed to leap to at each stage. It's like a logic game that I'm failing at.

What's the connection between adverts and the amount of money Ghibli made on their best-loved movie?

Hmm, maybe none, maybe you're using Ghibli as a metaphor for products that make money through adverts. And maybe the implied answer to the next question is that their next movie, The Cat Returns, would have been higher quality if they had made even more money on Spirited Away. So what you could be saying is that crippling the ad industry would lead to lower quality products, without even much reducing the number of (less effective) adverts that get made.

That's one way to read what you said, but I feel like I got it wrong.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#554

Post by anigbrowl »

wat10000 wrote: post #413
gameman144 wrote: post #249

This feels very similar in my mind to blanket concepts like "let's ban lobbying". There are certainly specific modes or practices in lobbying that are damaging to society, but lobbying itself (specifically, informing lawmakers about your specific perspective and desires) is a valid and desirable function. Likewise, advertising on its own at its core is useful: there might be something that adds value to your life tha…

Anyone who has found out about a useful product through advertising that you wouldn’t have know about otherwise, purchased it, and been pleased with your purchase, raise your hand. Anyone? This whole “advertising is useful” thing sounds like the spherical cow of marketing to me. It might make sense in abstract but it doesn’t reflect reality.

It is useful in specialist domains. If you love fashion then fashion magazine ads are worth studying, because you read them with a critical eye. If you're into any sort of nerd hobby (model trains, synthesizers, board games...) then the specialist magazines/video channels/forums for that hobby are interesting, again because you have a critical eye. Sure, there are ads that target the newbie with 'the first and last ______ you'll ever need!' but as you get more experienced in the hobby you quickly learn to distinguish which manufacturers are selling the dream vs offering their product. This remains true even on forums for particular vendors that have a cult following. Likewise for many professional trade news outlets.

But it only works where you have specialized focus and experienced/informed consumers that are able to separate the sizzle from the steak. For example, doctors and other medical professionals are generally well qualified to assess the claims of pharmaceutical advertising, consumers are not - even though I am comfortable reading the fine print in such ads and even reading papers about clinical trials, I still rate my evaluative ability as mediocre compared to a professional.

Mass market advertising for general consumers is generally cancer, imho.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#555

Post by BLKNSLVR »

627467 wrote: post #552

You know what is an example of propaganda/advertising? Peta, extinction rebellion et al antics. Marching for right to bear arms. Standing outside of Tesla dealers dissuading shoppers. Militancy, activism in general. At this stage of society I too think having less of any of this is good. It's a shame there's no ad blockers for militancy. The chance to achieve consensus on this is 0, so we will be left with propaganda…

You seem to have mentioned pretty much the only things that I think are worth keeping under your definition of "advertising".

(Noting that the extremities of some of those examples are already illegal)

It does highlight, however, that a shared definition of a spectrum of what "advertising" actually means, is the first step towards being able to exploit whatever rules the politicians decide upon.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#556

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters.

Advertising is just a name for a delivery mechanism for propaganda. Its not a difference of master, as is clear in the political realm where when we focus on a particular commercial delivery vehicle we talk about "campaign advertisements" but the content is still "political propaganda".

> Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow. We'd just be freed from the increasingly sophisticated machinery designed to override our decision-making.

No, the mechanisms would just get even more sophisticated, to work around whatever (inherently, and unavoidably, arbitrary) lines were drawn against "advertising" while permitting the flow of information and opinions about products.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#557

Post by BLKNSLVR »

snailmailman wrote: post #402
stego-tech wrote: post #234

Just from the headline alone: oh please dear god yes . The internet became usable after implementing the Pi-Hole. So much noise, so much wasted bandwidth, so many unnecessary lookups, gone with a Raspberry Pi and a few packages. While other commenters are getting into the technical weeds of things, the reality is that the OP is right. Ads don’t inform, they manipulate. They’re an abusive forced-marriage that we canno…

Youtube so badly wants me to pay for premium. But the ads they show me are almost entirely scams and questionably legal content. Ads for guns. Ads for viagra knockoffs. Ads for “stock market tips” that use AI generated celebrity impersonations. Ads for “free money the government isn’t telling you about”. It’s constant and ever-increasing. I stopped watching a 30 minute video recently after the 5th ad break just over…

I feel naive saying this, but a certain percentage of the ads on YouTube seem to contravene what would be legal of they were shown on television - in Australia at least.

It feels like standover tactics, showing the worst of the worst unless you pay up.

I should also at least admit that recently,Like the last 12 months, those greasy-type ads are less common, having been replaced with more television-style ads, although they last longer. Still an improvement overall though.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#558

Post by BLKNSLVR »

Let's start with banning the sharing/selling of customer data, tracking data, or anything else that can be aggregated to form some idea of a targetable resource.

That would shed some initial societal parasites. See what's left, and then go after the next biggest / grossest topic in the space.

I could get behind that particular brandishing of chainsaw.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#559

Post by cscurmudgeon »

grues-dinner wrote: post #514
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. While we're at radical thought experiments combine that with "what if any entity worth over 100 million (insert arbitrary limit here, perhaps what if it was based on an multiple of average employee salary) was disallowed". And, in fact, if the maximum company size were limited, and thus the marketplace wasn't a swimming pool full of…

[dead]

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#560

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #358
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 cas…

Don’t let perfect become the enemy of good. I spent 5+ years living in Hawaii, where just billboards are illegal. I can’t quantify the effect but qualitatively, it’s something I dearly miss in the concrete hell of Southern California.
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