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What if we made advertising illegal?

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Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#721

Post by fauigerzigerk »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #715
dash2 wrote: post #682

This idea isn't uncommon because it's beyond the Overton window, it's uncommon because it is silly and unworkable. * Total fantasy to think you wouldn't fall afoul of free speech, both legally (in the US) and morally. In fact, the author touts as a benefit that you'd stop populists being able to talk to their audience. This is destroying the village of liberal democracy in order to save it! * Absolutely zero thought…

Is the right to pay others for speech necessary for free speech to exist? If so it is already non-existent. No functioning democracy allows judges or politicians to sell their speech to the highest bidder for example. Why should advertisement be different?

The difference is that advertising is extremely broad while bribing a judge or politician is extremely narrow (not to speak of conflicting with their professional remit)

It's relatively easy and sensible to ban very specific forms of paying for influence. But a ban on publishing your opinion in someone else's publication is extremely broad and obviously in violation of free speech. Free speech isn't defined as standing on a corner yelling at people.

I also think it's counterproductive. All influence seeking (both commercial and political) would be forced to move from overt advertising to covert infiltration of our communication.

I want more transparency, not less.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#722

Post by owleyey3o »

dash2 wrote: post #682

This idea isn't uncommon because it's beyond the Overton window, it's uncommon because it is silly and unworkable. * Total fantasy to think you wouldn't fall afoul of free speech, both legally (in the US) and morally. In fact, the author touts as a benefit that you'd stop populists being able to talk to their audience. This is destroying the village of liberal democracy in order to save it! * Absolutely zero thought…

[flagged]

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#723

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

I suspect this proposal wouldn’t be met well. Ignore the pachyderm in the shared living space (all the lovely money people make from advertising), but defining “what’s an ad” gets sticky.

For example, highly relevant PSAs and warnings could be considered “ads.” They can be every bit as obnoxious as “penis pill” ads, but they convey information that may be of life and death importance.

The placards outside professional offices are ads; possibly the oldest form of advertising.

In-store signage are ads, and can cost sellers a lot of money.

You could argue that “shelf-stackers,” and “endcap displays” employed by supermarkets, are a form of advertising.

Sales people rely on personal relationships, and get quite skilled at making every conversation they have, into a sales pitch (which can get annoying).

Promotion is a very complex system, and often goes far beyond simple signage. For many businesses, it’s a matter of life and death.

People that run businesses probably can’t live without them, and are willing to pay a pretty penny for ads.

One thing that might be relevant, are “ad books,” like the old-fashioned Yellow Pages, “pennysaver” papers, or the “brand books,” used by designers. These are ads, but gathered into a place where they are expected, and actively sought out.

In the last century, we often called variants of these, “catalogs.”

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#725

Post by ajuc »

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…

There was almost no advertising in my country when I was 7. I live in Poland and till 1989 it was communist puppet state of USSR (not through our choice, obviously, so the moment we could - we noped out of it).

There was no point advertising because there was no competition, all the companies were nationalized and no matter how well or badly they did - their employees earned the same. If you persuaded people to buy your washing powder instead of the other available washing powder - that just means the queues for your washing powder will be longer.

There was A LOT of communist and anti western propaganda tho. But no advertising is perfectly possible.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#727

Post by someone654 »

dash2 wrote: post #710
ozornin wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how to police the boundaries Any existing policy inevitably has a gray area, no matter how elaborate it is. That's okay if the author didn't cover corner cases in a short essay. > You don't just magically know what to buy. Knowing what you need is not magic. I don't remember much advertising lately that would tell me how a good can satisfy my existing needs. Mostly, they are trying to make me feel I need something…

Hardly a corner case. It's such an obvious question that the failure to cover it means the author isn't serious. Knowing what you need is not magic, but knowing which products might satisfy it is not automatic. Advertising targeting, which people quite reasonably find intrusive, exists because advertisers desperately want to find people who may potentially want to buy their product.

> but knowing which products might satisfy it is not automatic.

Would not search + first party description solve that? It’s easy to create a page “you have problem A? Try our product B”.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#728

Post by kmacdough »

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…

> It's impossible. How do you even define advertising?

Seems you're insistent on letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. This is precisely why judges exist. It would not be difficult to define Ads well enough to cover 99% of current advertising. Sure there will be gray areas. Advertisers will adapt. But it would make it profoundly more expensive, difficult and risky.

I'm not sure I understand a concrete economic argument other than "anything which makes it harder for businesses to be wildly profitable off minimal value hurts the economy". But that only really holds of you define the economy by things like GDP, which really just capture how wildly profitable companies are and have almost no bearing on quality of life for the people; in other words, the argument is circular.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#729

Post by movpasd »

A lot of discussion here about where boundaries would be with free speech, how this would be implemented, specific details. But, as with any policy, this is not a binary "do it or don't". This is a dial that can be turned in a more libertarian or a more regulatory direction. (In fact, even this is simplistic: it's many hundreds of conceptually correlated dials.)

The interesting question is whether we're happy with where the dial is right now, which direction we want to push it, and how fast --- and the underlying meaning of the article is that maybe we should be pushing it in the regulatory direction very fast indeed.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#730

Post by dukeyukey »

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…

Eh, even if you exclude any potential side effects like that I don't see it being workable. I believe advertising as done today is _mostly_ a zero sum game, but without any advertising at all, it's going to be _really_ hard to find out about stuff!
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