Ideally, all ads should be plain text listing of facts. Pictures only allowed for demonstrative purposes. And they should be listed in "Ad sections", like a phone book.
Coca-Cola tastes great!
Coca-Cola gives you an extra pep in your step!
Coca-Cola will rot you teeth!
These are all true statements (the first one is subjective, I'll admit), but I suspect that many believe the effect of plain test listing of facts would only allow the third statement.
> Pictures only allowed for demonstrative purposes.
Wouldn't a photo of someone drinking a Coke and enjoying it be allowed under this rule?
Useful listings of facts look like this:
- is carbonated (therefore acidic, refreshing, negatively impacting teeth)
- has x mg sugar per 100ml (therefore energizing to some extent, promoting weight gain)
- has x mg of caffeine per 100ml (therefore energizing to some extent)
- has Foobar taste (Foobar because I'm not sure if there's anything common with similar taste, so perhaps it's not even worth mentioning)
- it's intended to energize, refresh, help digest meals
"Will do X for you" statements are usually not true when taken at face value, and they're already manipulative. Statements of fact, lists of features, and descriptions of intended application is what I'd like to see instead.
At this point, you need a federal bureaucracy policing practically all retail commercial speech.
If they say Coca-Cola is refreshing, and I found it's not, courts now say it is reasonable to assume that the statement is subjective. If the reasonability test is changed they will no longer be able to advertise opinions.
I want to neuter advertising more than anything, but I can't think of any kind of "rule" we could establish that would make public mind hacking illegal.
While all of those coca cola ads are "true", they would be limited in scope to places that coca cola owns. So no bus stations or taxi toppers or whatever, unless they buy a fleet of taxis.
- Ads would be implicitly banned.
- Coca Cola couldn't bypass this rule by buying a taxi fleet because they aren't a taxi company.
- Newspapers could still operate even though journalists get paid for speech.
It could also help against other problems, depending on how narrow the purpose of a company has to be:
- ISPs have no incentive to violate net neutrality by privileging their own value added services (streaming etc) because their ISPs not streaming providers.
- If you subscribe to a folder that syncs you know that it will remain a folder that syncs. The behind it won't pivot to something you neither want not need, bloating the software till it bursts.
- Similarly: No incredible journeys anymore. Products don't get discontinued because they get in the way of $CORPORATION's plans.
- Chosing services because they aren't owned by Facebook actually works.
- Open protocols would be a thing again if we decouple clients and services. Edge case: Someone initially has to develop a client, a server and the protocol.
The idea is that by separating concerns, we enable customers to decide where their money goes and to freely chose between goods and services without getting artificially locked into any corporation's ecosystem.
1) No depictions of people
2) Advertising only inside stores
Consensus and some common sense and case by case judgement ought to be enough to decide whether ad placement is appropriate.
An advertisement is a communication designed to manipulate its recipient. Whether it's "true" or not is neither here nor there. In fact, a lot of advertisements are complete non-sequiturs, because those kinds of statements are less likely to make the listeners/viewers think critically about the statements.
This is highly misleading as it will not under normal use. It is acidic just like orange juice. The rest of your phrases, while subjective, work under normal use.
Then John B. Watson and the study of behaviorism came along in the early 20th century. Persuasion techniques were systematically identified and studied, and with the advent of mass media (TV, radio, internet), the cognitive shortcuts meant for neighbors and friends (tribe members) to persuade each other became flaws to abuse on a massive scale for profit and political power.
I think it's well recognized by anyone who is interested in this stuff that persuasion techniques are an abuse of human psychology. Cialdini's books are perhaps the most famous. Everyone merely tells themselves, "other people are doing it, and their products or ideas are worse, so we have to."