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Comment by hailwren | Hacker News Reader

It's not pedantry at all. Look at F1's battle with cigarette advertising for a concrete example. Certainly, explicit advertising is easy to stop, but there are many ways of advertising things surreptitiously.

A great example of this is Ferrari's evolution to avoid the F1 cigarette ban. They started with the word Marlboro on the side of their car, then they moved to a barcode that resembled a pack of cigarettes, and now they are partnered with a front company called Mission Winnow (google it, it's really interesting) that is widely believed to be subliminal advertising for Marlboro.

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What point are you trying to make? The system seems working as intended if Ferrari is going to such great lengths to avoid explicit advertisement.

There will always be those who break laws, doesn’t mean that we should stop making laws.

The point is that this is a policy that is hard to enforce because it is ambiguous. The system worked as intended if you think that the point was to make only the most well-financed and technically savvy advertisers able to receive a benefit.

Laws don't have anything to do with this thread?

> as intended if you think that the point was to make only the most well-financed and technically savvy advertisers able to receive a benefit.

Your argument is that breaking a law is expensive and only those with money can break it so why bother with laws. Beyond ridiculous.

The example you’re using is also not convincing. Statistically insignificant amount of people know or care enough to watch F1 races.

> The example you’re using is also not convincing. Statistically insignificant amount of people know or care enough to watch F1 races.

We have 1 user on the internet vs $1 Billion in advertising budget. I'm going to trust that Philip Morris is better at quantifying the effect here.

> Your argument is that breaking a law is expensive and only those with money can break it so why bother with laws. Beyond ridiculous.

This still has nothing to do with laws. It's an important distinction to make between laws and corporate policy because one carries very high punishments whilst the other is mostly without recourse.

My argument is in no way proscriptive. Only descriptive.

The example that you used was specifically in the context of corporations getting around anti-tobacco laws. Not corporate policy against tobacco advertisement, but laws. I stand by my assessment that its a bad example to make the point you're trying to make.

> It's an important distinction to make between laws and corporate policy because one carries very high punishments whilst the other is mostly without recourse.

I agree with this.

> The example that you used was specifically in the context of corporations getting around anti-tobacco laws. Not corporate policy against tobacco advertisement, but laws. I stand by my assessment that its a bad example to make the point you're trying to make.

This is mostly incorrect. There are _some_ countries where tobacco advertising laws are the reason for Formula 1's tobacco advertising ban, but the rule being circumvented is FIA's tobacco ban. Interestingly, in countries where tobacco advertising is illegal, Ferrari often changes their livery to not include Mission Winnow.

With each such iteration, the advertising punch is diluted. At this point, it's a stretch to imagine someone seeing the mirrored M-W logo and going "God, I need a smoke". In this way, we are all the better for it.

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