As your edit admits, this is not at all what I said. To expand a bit--I think there's a big distinction between advertisement in a fundamental sense and how advertisement often is implemented today. I think that advertising can be done in a good way, and I'm concerned that too many people dismiss advertising altogether because of things like real-time bidding.
* No personalisation * Full transparency (must be publicly available who is paying for this, ...) * No brainwashing, lies, propaganda, ... * No advertising of certain controversial things (alcohol, tabacco,... I don't know who'd define what's ok)
Since we have basically no restrictions today on what is allowed, I'll still use ad blocker, advice everyone to do the same. And of course I'll rant how ads are bad on the internet.
I have no idea, it's an extremely complicated problem, especially considering trade-offs between privacy and competition.
> No advertising of certain controversial things (alcohol, tabacco,... I don't know who'd define what's ok)
That last bit is the kicker ;).
Agreed again, but IMHO even if you go with "traditional" advertising it definitely can be done too much, it's (in)famous now between us people who are overall against ads the pictures of cities that banned ads:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
https://dontdrinkthetapwatercom.wordpress.com/2017/09/25/291...
I am from an old European city and I love looking at the buildings and public spaces and not being bombarded by ads. In contrast, I think it's interesting now that I live in Tokyo and there's areas where ads creep up buildings, but because it's a somewhat very jarring visual experience in some places, in general it's one of the things that I really dislike here, beautiful buildings covered by giant ugly paper ads.
So rephrasing things, where do I think ads are okay? I haven't thought about it too much, but possibly:
- On a sidebar in a website, like Google did back on the day
- On a magazine, both full-page and in-page, as long as they are limited
- On TV as long as they are limited (they are by law in Spain)
- Newspaper ads section
- Specialized magazines, websites, directories, etc (white-pages-like), including Google Maps
- Recommendations within the page's theme (a section with new or highlighted restaurants in tripdavisor/yelp).
- Probably few more places like this.
For things that you _need_ to do to live your normal life I don't think we should be forced to stare at ads. I'm sure a lot more people would stop staring at their phones if the train/bus showed art, interesting videos, etc. in their tvs instead of ads (as they used to do in my hometown). Now wherever you look, it's all ads.
Your post reminds me of a friend who was an ardent Bernie Sanders supporter in the 2016 primaries, until Bernie lost to Hillary, and this man became a huge Hillary champion overnight. It wasn't enough for him to vote for an odious candidate for practical reasons. Now, Hillary was always the best candidate because she's very "qualified" or "details oriented". Nothing about Hillary changed, nor did he learn any new information about her. But he changed his mental model of Hillary to support his "change of mind".