What if we made advertising illegal?

The main difference between advertising and propaganda is that advertising usually is obvious and loud, and in many countries is required to be declared: people need to know they're watching an ad. You have specific placements for ads that are clearly defined: tv breaks, outdoors, even banners. It's true that there are active efforts to blurr those lines, but still.

The problem of propaganda is that it's mainly being done covertly, no one is saying they're speaking on behalf of someone or of an ideology.

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

While this concept sounds good, it doesn't seem to work in the real world. For example, could shops have billboards on their property? What about businesses that didn't have prime locations? How would people know they existed? How would small businesses compete with big retailers?

One of the things the internet brought, for better and worse, was to lower the barrier of entry—you wouldn't need to be a massive brand that could afford to have its product placed on TV Shows or even to have sales teams selling door to door.

You don't define "advertising". You look for things that advertisers do and see if they can be made illegal or unprofitable.

Formula 1 cars used to have displays for tobacco products. At one point, the law in Europe started saying "you can not do that", so tobacco advertisements disappeared.

Do we need a way to connect suppliers with consumers? Yes. Do we need an intermediary that acts in bad faith? No we do not.

I would propose the crazy idea that such intermediaries should be at least equally responsible to the consumers as the suppliers.

That would be helpful.

Only to authoritarians who think banning things is the solution to everything.

This is the typical "common sense Genius notion" that hasn't been thought out one bit.

This person doesn't care for democracy. They are zealots and ignore the fact that:

- marketing is communication to achieve a goal (reaching a potential customer about the value of a service) and is a legal way for companies to compete. If they can't do marketing legally they'll do it illegally and/or compete with violence. - discoverability is necessary and if you didn't have any means to discover stuff it would be insane or worse, absolutely dictated by this "democracy lover" who wants to have total control for "the greater good".

I don't like ads one bit and absolutely welcome regulation (which is hard because whether you outlaw something or not, the money will be there, see alcohol and prohibition) but this is just so self congratulating and obtuse that it's hard to take it seriously.

All the talk about propaganda or fascism and laughing at the concept of free speech tells me this is yet again, one of these "my blue party lost the elections and I blame propaganda and ads" and that they haven't even given it a second thought beyond "I get clicks" because they don't explain how they propose making sure communication doesn't hide advertising in it. Articles like hers advertise her blog, posting it here is advertising. Making any sort of argument about X being better is an advertisement for X.

It's like people want to play scenarios in their head and refuse to think about economics and game theory because the reality is they want to shape the world politically to their will. Authoritanism hidden with "good feels".

No thank you. You're far more dangerousn than ads.