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What if we made advertising illegal?

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Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#81

Post by djoldman »

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…

In the communications industry there are SOME fairly bright definitions:

- Advertising and marketing are when an entity pays some other entity to transmit content

- Public relations is when an entity, without paying, causes another entity to transmit content

- Public affairs is when an entity causes a governmental entity to consume specific content at minimum, up to possibly influencing decisions. It should go without saying that this is without paying as well, otherwise it's corruption/bribery

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#82

Post by Uvix »

lukev wrote: post #40
hedayet wrote: post #14

Advertising has consequences, and I’m not a big fan of it, but it’s also a necessary evil. It’s easy to dismiss advertising as just a profit engine for ad platforms, but that’s only part of the picture. At its best, advertising plays a meaningful role in solution and product discovery, especially for new or niche offerings that users wouldn’t encounter otherwise. It also promotes fairer market competition by giving s…

I disagree. Advertising is a zero-sum game. If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth. It's only when some actors start advertising that the others must as well, so they don't fall behind. And so billions of dollars are spent that could have gone to making better products. It's basically the prisoner's dilemma at scale.

Without advertising you won't have search, because that's how search engines are funded. And you'll also lose pretty much all of the online options for word-of-mouth, too.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#83

Post by phreeza »

lukev wrote: post #40
hedayet wrote: post #14

Advertising has consequences, and I’m not a big fan of it, but it’s also a necessary evil. It’s easy to dismiss advertising as just a profit engine for ad platforms, but that’s only part of the picture. At its best, advertising plays a meaningful role in solution and product discovery, especially for new or niche offerings that users wouldn’t encounter otherwise. It also promotes fairer market competition by giving s…

I disagree. Advertising is a zero-sum game. If nobody advertised, every solution would be equally discoverable via search and word-of-mouth. It's only when some actors start advertising that the others must as well, so they don't fall behind. And so billions of dollars are spent that could have gone to making better products. It's basically the prisoner's dilemma at scale.

I don't think it's a zero sum game. Some degree of advertising will make a product more discoverable regardless of whether competitors advertise or not.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#84

Post by kiicia »

hedayet wrote: post #14

Advertising has consequences, and I’m not a big fan of it, but it’s also a necessary evil. It’s easy to dismiss advertising as just a profit engine for ad platforms, but that’s only part of the picture. At its best, advertising plays a meaningful role in solution and product discovery, especially for new or niche offerings that users wouldn’t encounter otherwise. It also promotes fairer market competition by giving s…

Ad business stopped to be necessary and started to be almost exclusively evil years ago. If you pay sociologists and psychologists to design „most effective ad” for you, something is clearly wrong. 100 years ago ads were indeed ways of discovering products and services. But now ads are almost exclusively battlefields for more and more money paid for by consumers’ anxiety, wellbeing and health when ads are more and more dishonest and hostile.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#85

Post by bofadeez »

kcatskcolbdi wrote: post #59
bofadeez wrote: post #15

This is free speech. It's not open for discussion. Our right to free speech is not granted by anyone's consent or by government decree. It preexists the state and cannot be taken away. We hold this truth to be self-evident. We are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights. If any government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.

Of course it's open for discussion. Free speech is not limitless. You can wax poetically all you want about endowment by the creator, but try saying racial slurs on daytime TV and see how long that lasts. Advertisement is just another form of speech that can be limited.

"Congress shall MAKE NO LAW respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

What part of that are you confused by? You are making a brash claim that the writ of the state includes the ability to censor speech.

Your right to free speech is not granted by anyone. It's your natural right. It's not possible to separate this right from a human with a law.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#86

Post by doctorpangloss »

andrewstuart wrote: post #49

Most people who protest oil use cars, roads and plastics, all made of oil. And people who object to advertising live in a world in which their daily lives are provided for by companies that depend on advertising to exist. As PT Barnum said "Without promotion, something terrible happens... nothing!" and all the companies that make up our economic ecosystem depend on things happening …. sales, which don’t happen withou…

I don’t know why you’re being downvoted. “Make illegal the parts of the economy I see and I don’t like, but not the parts of the economy that belong to the same category but I simply do not see” is just one of many flaws of low effort insight blogs.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#87

Post by goatlover »

UncleEntity wrote: post #30

Ok... First, it is 100% free speech. Second, the government isn't allowed to make laws prohibiting the exercise of free speech based on the content of said speech. Nor can it take actions which are arbitrary or capricious. Third, restrictions on free speech MUST fulfill some overriding public good like yelling "fire" in a crowded theater or words meant to incite violence. Slander, libel, &etc. Fourth, why is it even…

I'm not convinced modern advertising qualifies as free speech. It's often manipulative, used by bad faith actors, used for tracking, slows websites down, is obtrusive, disrupts concentration, etc.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#88

Post by esafak »

galangalalgol wrote: post #67
WalterBright wrote: post #25

Who is going to know about your product if you cannot advertise it?

People who pay for consumer research type services. "I want a general-purpose systems programming language with a C-like syntax that compiles to native code. It should be statically typed and supports both automatic (garbage collected) and manual memory management." One micro payment later I have a list of links and reviews. In this case the research is the product instead of me.

Then your company would be beholden to the Yelp's of the world. Pay up or have your listing removed.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#90

Post by spaceywilly »

“What if we made advertising illegal?”

Many small companies would go out of business, that’s what. Yes we definitely need advertising reform, but advertising is a very important part of any business if they want to be successful. Making it illegal would cut a lot of businesses off from their potential customers. The author doesn’t seem to propose any alternative solution for this.

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