- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
The idea feels like sci-fi because you’re so used to it, imagining ads gone feels like asking to outlaw gravity. But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence. Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.
The traditional argument pro-advertising—that it provides consumers with necessary information—hasn’t been valid for decades.
You must log in or register to comment.
No, advertising is useful to small businesses and big. What needs to happen, is actual thoughtful regulation, as with everything else.
Los Angeles county vs Orange county.
LA allows billboards, OC doesn’t. It just feels so much cleaner and like a breath of fresh air as you drive from LA into OC.
Same with Maine, state banned billboards. Makes it super weird when you head south and get assaulted by them in Mass
I don’t have a problem with ads, but sometimes it does get be too much and feels a bit assaulty.
Appealing idea obviously. But I think if everything else stayed the same, and suddenly ads were banned, we’d just see a lot of shady underhand tactics emerging.
There’s already lots of grey areas, influencers who are supposedly just talking about things they like but have some relationship with a brand they happen to promote… Is no one ever allowed to discuss a product? Can I promote Librewolf to people? But only as long as librewolf don’t give me any free swag? Do reviewers no longer get free copies of book or free screenings of movies? What if I contributed to a project, can I talk about my own work on my own channels?
The viral marketing stuff of the 90s was pretty weird. Dreadful though target online ads are, gangs of people going around the real world trying to influence word of mouth feels even more dystopian. Although, if big companies were encouraging staff to volunteer and get involved in community projects, (and giving them time off to do them) with the understanding that they’d “innocently mention” that they work at Nike, maybe that would be better than the current setup.
In the past, physical buildings often served as advertising. Lots of high end stores on shopping streets are mostly there as a physical advert for the brand, not because they particularly make a profit. Do we really want McDonald’s expanding into real estate to start making building reminiscent of the golden arches in visible locations? But maybe even if these alternatives would be intrusive in new and horrible ways, they are limited by being in the real world, and thus not infinitely scalable. And if city centres are revived by brands desperate for attention, and corporations has be involved in communities on an individual employee level, instead of just sticking a logo on something, maybe that would counterbalance the bad with some good.
I agree, as in many more cases it is better to regulate than it is to forbid. Companies and consumers will find a way.
Thanks for the thorough comment. I’d say your assessment is accurate. As it is, McDonald’s is a real estate company that also sells hamburgers. Corporations are not waiting for advertisement to be banned before they do those things. They’ve been doing them for a while. We should ban advertisement. The dystopia arrived a while ago.
considering tons of free services are paid for with advertising, a lot of such services would cease to exist/be free.
be it websites such as youtube and streaming sites like twitch, or almost any website for that matter.
someone made a brand of water thats free and is entirely paid by advertising printed on the bottle, that would be gone too.
hell, i hate ads, but considering i use ublock, i havent seen any in years, and in real life you can just not look at them.
I’m sure they would change their business model with some free watching hours to lure you in, and then once they become valuable to you, you have to pay to continue watching. Or something like that.
Yes yes yes, this!
I always joke w my gf, that when I’m president, I’ll ban marketing. It’s ugly, wasteful, useless (from the consumer’s pov,) annoying, etc. I can’t believe it’s not hyper-regulated and taxed into oblivion.
How…Would you do that?
You do know that that marketing or advertising is far FAR more fundamental right? Yeah, there is a lot of BS these days, for sure.
But the concept of trying to find someone to sell something you made too cannot be banned. Unless you have a solution to the entire concept of “selling” anything, and turn society into one without needs?
It’s 5000 BC and I just made a pot with a lip that pours water easier. I tell someone about this in hopes they might want one too so i can survive on my work <----- that’s advertising.
It’s 2000 BC and I discovered a new spice and am trying to sell it for cooking. I demonstrate how it smells <----- that’s advertising.
…etc Apply this to almost everything anyone has made that they try to sell to someone else. They advertise and market it.
right now, your own post, marketing what you might do as president… Is a form of marketing.
It’s deeply engrained in every single society, and has been for thousands (tens of thousands?) of years. It’s a fundamental concept for humans and humans society.
Would @[email protected] please share your thoughts on the response from @[email protected]?
Of course if these ideas were ever put into practice, they’d require the establishment of definitions, scope, parameters, exceptions, consequences, etc.
I think a lot of us understand the spirit of the OP, and you’re showing us you aren’t on the same page or even opened the book.
Sure, if the offered idea was to abolish every philosophically tangential advertisment, then you’ll be the advertisor of reason when we advertise bans on flowers’ colors because they advertise to pollinators, or bans on babies’ cries because they’re advertising their want of nourishment.
They and possibly op (with their argument that 99.9% ad free) is referring to modern day advertisements that mass manipulates people. A person in 2000 BC telling their spice is better doesn’t compare to our modern advertisement system which targets suggestible people with well placed targeted ads. They also are probably referring to those ads which you constantly see barging into your every day life in the form of billboards, banners etc. If you were to search for a something in Google, most often the front result would be non relevant SEO garbage or AI gibberish promoting something which is not relevant to something you searched. Oh you want to know why you have this BSOD screen and warning, check out this antivirus software sort of bullshit results.
Even though what you said is right, that advertisement has fundamentally existed ever since human moved out of tribal society, the form of advertisement we see now is never before seen and in my opinion which I agree with OP is than we can indeed abolish current form of advertisement and move on without significant impact on normal people. Ofcourse we would still be documenting products and people who want that could still seek out what they want based on their requirement (this might qualify as advertisement since the product won’t be seen without information regarding it, but it’s no way comparable to the form of advertisement you and I mentioned above).
You can and should make the distinction between being paid to advertise something and sharing information based on your believes. There is such a thing as free marketing and I agree you cannot ban that, but you can ban paid advertising in a similar way as paid sex is banned in many places across the world.
I’m now imagining advertising being carried out the same way prostitution is.
“Hey sailor, want some good product recommendations?”
I think life would feel more calm, spacious and peaceful.
100%!
The most hectic places in the world are the screens-filled streets of Tokyo and New York IMO (that’s not all the streets ofc)
Ads try to grab your attention or show off right into your face, removing them would 100% make life more tranquil.
That’d be nice.
There were ads in ancient Rome, just to show how deep the rot goes.
The problem is: Where does advertising start. Is mentioning a brand name somewhere already advertising? If I have a brand, call it GLURP, am I allowed to print GLURP on the product, on the box, on the instructions? Am I allowed to have a website called GLURP.com, and what would be allowed to be shown there? Can I open a shop and have a sign “GLURP” over the window? Can I really exhibit my products there?
Because all of this is advertising.
I think we can all agree that 99.99% at least of intruding ads on the net, billboards, TV, radio, whatever, are annoying and should go away. But any ruling trying to reign this in needs to set 100% clear and undisputable limits, because they will sacrifice their own kids to somehow skirt such a law. If you don’t believe me, look at tax laws and how the rich don’t pay taxes (despite frequent bouts of crying over the 37% they never pay).
No shit. I don’t think anybody wants to ban any of your examples. It’s the 99.9% as you said that’s being discussed here. Of course the ruling would have to be clear. That’s true of all such rulings. And of course businesses will try to skirt the law, because that’s always the case with businesses.
Interesting concept. Over the last few decades we have seen cigarettes/vapes alcohol, small plastics etc come under scrutiny as they harm people’s health. But there are physical objects that harm physical health.
Advertising is much more subjective I tend of what constitutes harm, and mental health is again still on the back foot compared to body health.
In some places we have seen bans on cigarette adverting and even bans on cigarettes. So at a small scale it can be implemented.
I loved ads as a kid. It shaped my career, but it’s an out of control monster that needs looking at. I am growing to hate it.
Oh please gods yes. Advertising is violence and even though most of my life is now ad free, I still can’t avoid the advertising scourge being shoved into my eyeballs every time I leave my house. It would be a blessed weight lifted from my already tired brain to never see a single ad again.
“advertising is violence” says so much about how we (the world) allow companies to behave.
“Advertising is violence???”
Anyone who says these kind of statements should be forced to watch an hour of gore.
Nobody who isn’t knee deep in circle jerking leftist communities thinks you’re clever. You can argue against advertising without trivializing worse things.
Yes please nobody should be able to pay to force people to look at eye cancer ads
It blew my mind when I read that snacking wasn’t a thing until rather recently. In the past, there were three meals a day, if you were lucky.
Nowadays, we all are constantly told by advertising to “take a break” and stuff ourselves. Take a break from what? Sitting in an office chair? Who is really tilling the soil from dawn to dusk anymore? And then they wonder about the worldwide obesity epidemic. A big mystery, indeed.The first use of the tagline ‘Have a Break. Have a Kit Kat’, written by the agency’s Donald Gilles, can be traced to May 1957. A year later it was used on the first television spots for the brand and ever since has been a staple of campaigns for the chocolate bar.
Ideally, I’d love for it to work, but realistically it would devastate the current ecosystem if implemented naively.
Imagine how much labour and money we’d free up to do actually useful things like help homeless people and disabled people etc. If we cut all those marketing and advertising departments.
It’s a whole massive industry that takes massive amounts of financial resources and human labour and doesn’t contribute to anyone’s wellbeing except the stockholders of the company.
