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What if we made advertising illegal?

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Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#831

Post by wat10000 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #554
wat10000 wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think we should separate ads that people seek out from ads that people put up with. They’re very different in purpose and effect. When the ad is the thing you actually want to see, I have no problem with it. The issue is ads that you’d rather not see, but are either attached to something you do want to see, or are placed where you have no choice.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#832

Post by harimau777 »

Loughla wrote: post #820
harimau777 wrote: post #818

Maybe a good initial step would be to tighten up false advertising laws: Make it illegal to make statements that are not objectively true. E.g. you can't say that your product is "the best", you can only say specifically how it is better. Put restrictions on advertising an idealized version of a product and then selling a lesser version. E.g. the difference between what fast food ads show versus what you get. I'm sur…

They already do that. Is always in TINY print or they use weasel words that are meaningless in common use, but defendable in court. Improved health is a good one. It doesn't really mean anything.

That's exactly the sort of thing that I think should be banned. Particularly the meaningless terms like "improved health".

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#833

Post by lambda »

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…

In Vermont, we have banned outdoor advertising (billboards) for over 50 years with no such issues.

It's hilarious that you think that advertising is actually necessary for economic prosperity. If anything, it's probably a net drain on it.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#834

Post by Benjammer »

pembrook wrote: post #720
camgunz wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this dynamic in tech all the time: "We'd like to pay/invest in you tremendous amounts of money to make X more efficient": yes, absolutely we know what X is and we understand scaling it is immensely valuable and fundamentally changes everything. "We'd like to regulate X, making it safer, and therefore harder or even impossible to do": that's ridiculous, you could always do X, what even is X anyway, don't tread o…

Out of all of HN’s biases, the violent hatred of advertising is by far one of the most misguided. Human attention is scarce. Demand for that attention is endless. Scarcity + demand creates a natural market by default, meaning you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely (vs just regulating with guardrails). Disrupting natural markets with authoritarianism usually ends up worse than any downsides of the…

I think the only reason that demand is endless is due to how profitable it is to sell that attention to advertisers...

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#835

Post by notnullorvoid »

I love the general idea, but banning all forms of paid advertising seems a step to far. That encompass a lot, and enforcing it would be near impossible. There's also clear areas where it could have a negative impact, like for public transport that relies on providing ad placement.

I don't see a problem with criminalizing big ad companies, ad markets, and ad middlemen. I think that would solve a good chunk of the issue.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#836

Post by linsomniac »

What if advertising were 100% truthful and straightforward. Like in that movie "The Invention of Lying" with the scene that shows a close up of the side of a bus with "Pepsi" on it, then as it pulls away the full advert reads "Pepsi... For when then don't have Coke".

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#837

Post by dribblecup »

Don't ban advertising but also don't treat commercial advertising as pure free speech.

For instance, for false claims, make it easier to drag a corporation into court and get legal remedies commensurate with the damage or potential damage caused by their dishonesty.

Right now the bias is towards unfettered, dishonest and psychologically manipulative commercial "free speech" with no guardrails the average person can enforce.

So, saying "we think this is the best detergent ever" is fine. It's clearly an opinion. But false or generally misleading claims, especially those that cover-up the potential dangers of the product, could lead to punitive damages sufficient to be a deterrent.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#838

Post by trinsic2 »

pembrook wrote: post #720
camgunz wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this dynamic in tech all the time: "We'd like to pay/invest in you tremendous amounts of money to make X more efficient": yes, absolutely we know what X is and we understand scaling it is immensely valuable and fundamentally changes everything. "We'd like to regulate X, making it safer, and therefore harder or even impossible to do": that's ridiculous, you could always do X, what even is X anyway, don't tread o…

Out of all of HN’s biases, the violent hatred of advertising is by far one of the most misguided. Human attention is scarce. Demand for that attention is endless. Scarcity + demand creates a natural market by default, meaning you must use brutal authoritarianism to disrupt it entirely (vs just regulating with guardrails). Disrupting natural markets with authoritarianism usually ends up worse than any downsides of the…

> Hence why this is a non-serious, silly idea.

I don't know if I go that far. I can see arguments for both sides of the issue. And at the same time, I know it would be impossible to do, but I could see that not having advertising would fix a lot of problems in our society. And yes, advertising is a broad term. Maybe we have clear rules around what's advertising and what's propaganda.

Re: What if we made advertising illegal?

#840

Post by mlsu »

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…

In tech specifically: is it the same mechanism? I mean, does commercial advertising and political propaganda flow through the same channel?

I would love your input as someone on the inside. My understanding, broadly, is that when there’s commercial advertising, it goes through a different channel; there’s an auction, the ad is marked, CTR is tracked etc. whereas I think the political polarization and the use of propaganda on social media happens much less explicitly: it’s “mixed in”with the non-ad content that’s posted, and therefore much harder to detect or remove.

I’m also curious how you might handle influencers. Those, like propaganda operations, are an attempt to influence people’s behavior but “from inside” the ad/non-ad boundary.

And then, I’m convinced, a lot of our politics today is simply an emergent phenomenon of the algorithmic feed. That there is no master, corporate or political, that lead to this condition. It simply happened as a result of “for you.” (I think this is changing, as the powerful are discovering how powerful the algorithm is at influencing their subjects).

I think I agree with you broadly. The total sublimation of human relationships and interactions into “the machine” has a whole host of really bad side-effects. Jacking into cyberspace causes the shakes, at a society wide level and certainly at an individual level as well.

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