We banned tobacco advertisements in most places - it seems like alcohol should probably be in a similar category.
Make it so that you have to actually go looking for it, with a product in mind to buy, or just generally be in a shopping kind of mood in order to see it. Our world would be a dramatically different place without all the constant drains on our attention trying desperately to get us to consume.
Connecting products to potential consumers is important.
I disagree. The whole point of advertisements is to connect buyers with sellers. Which does not at all indicate the authenticity or honesty of the transaction. If you had no morals but you could put an ad up that made people immediately buy your product, would it not still be an ad?
There's obviously all sorts of guard rails to advertisements that we have in practice or can theorize about. From deceptive ads to brain-hacks, ads are just a form of media and they can take all shapes and sizes.
Hell, i'd be more open to the idea of ads if they were just what you said. Instead it's a very adversarial relationship where they don't just want to make sure i know Coke exists, but to trick my brain into wanting Coke. This isn't a knowledge transfer it's an attempt at dopamine and association. You're Pavlov's dog and they hold the bell in this experiment.
Which is not an argument against all advertisements. Merely stating that it's not as clean cut and free of manipulation as you suggest.
Advertising in public places is privatizing the commons, and, taken to the extreme, is negative-sum.
Consider this billboard on a boat that ruins the view at a public beach: https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/i939xz/thi...
Yes, there might be small positive economic benefit to the one person on the beach who actually needed the advertised product, but a huge, diffuse negative externality to everyone else.
Most public advertising is not this bad, but if you drive on the highway in a state that has banned billboards, such as Vermont, and then you cross the border into a state that allows them, you notice it, and not in a good way. We'd be collectively better off if they were banned everywhere.
Allow advertising in private spaces, but ban in public.
I can easily look either side of the sign and see the same thing I would see where the sign is. I genuinely don't see the downside.
We live in a democracy and it's up to a majority to decide what to do with the public commons. It is telling, to me, that no state that has banned billboards (Alaska, Hawaii, Vermont, Maine) has any serious political movement from any part of the spectrum to reverse the bans.
Why should one profit-seeking entity get to put a billboard in the middle of everyone's scenic view without paying everyone?
And if one billboard can be put there, what's to stop there being ten, or a thousand, and then there's no more view?
A lot of problems in the world are due to profits being made at the expense of the commons. This happens with everything from resource extraction and pollution of the environment, to telemarketing which aggravates most people, to outrage driven media and social networks polluting peoples minds.
Also, you run an adblocker, as do many (most?) people. Why is that? Don't you want to be more informed about products you might want?
Personally I don't want to be informed at all. If I never saw another billboard, Internet ad/banner, etc. in my life it would be great. I don't consent to being advertised to in such a broad, and distracting manner either.
This just seems silly. When was the last time you came home from the store with something, look around “I don’t have a use for this? Why did I buy this?”
And I don’t run an ad blocker because I equate it with petty theft. Sites offer you content. Content costs money to create and host. They offer it in exchange for showing you ads. If you don’t like someone’s terms in a barter you don’t morally get to take their side for free.
I take your point, but the other side of the coin is that I want to control what is executed/displayed on my computers (that is, my private property). Especially since it's not just ads. It's web trackers/beacons and other tools to surreptitiously gather data about me. And I don't want to share my PII/browsing habits/interests with a bunch of strangers who just want to sell me stuff[0].
If a web site (someone else's private property) chooses to serve ads, I am under no obligation to download/execute/display those ads or anything else for that matter.
And if the owner/publisher of a website wants to insist on showing me ads (by identifying ad blockers and refusing to display actual content -- which some sites do) -- unless I disable my ad blocker), that's the website publisher's right on their private property.
But I'll say it again -- I will control what content is displayed/executed/downloaded on my private property.
You seem to think that I should give control of my devices to someone else in order to consume their content. I'm unwilling to do so. As such, if someone else doesn't like that, they are free to block me from viewing their site.
But I'm not "stealing" by blocking ads, rather I'm protecting my own interests. If you (or anyone else) wants me not to do that, then block me if I'm using an ad blocker. Making the claim that it's somehow "stealing" is ridiculous on its face.
[0] To put a really fine point on that: Fuck that noise!
The reality however is that manipulative advertising is far more effective, so the free market will always select for it.
Edit: seems not according to your profile, but it certainly does sound like it's written by an advertiser "connecting" people to products and carefully ignoring the fact that once a person has been "introduced" once they don't need to be "introduced" to it multiple times a day forever after.
Edit 2: "Oh neat, that thing solves a problem or desire I have" - just like the tobacco industry solve the problem of widespread nicotine deficiency.
In ML terms, they are fine-tuning you to increase the chances of your mind generating a sequence "Coca Cola" in increasing number of contexts that otherwise had you not interested in buying.
Let's say I work in ad-tech, and am hired to do an online advertising campaign for an online casino. Let's say I leverage some generative models as part of my campaign tuning, as well as some pretty sophisticated user tracking. At the end of the day, suppose my algorithms have done a good job of creating and targeting advertisements that result in conversions. Everybody wins, right? I make money, my client makes money, consumers learn about a product they are (evidently) interested in.
Suppose further that the advertisement my algorithms generated does a good job of triggering cravings in gambling addicts (perhaps emulating the sensory experience of slot machines), and that my targeting found online communities focused on addiction. The problems with this should be obvious.
At the core, you're assuming that humans are perfect little rational automata, when the reality is that we're sentient animals with a lot of maladaptive brain behavior that can be exploited in known ways. Advertisements are not simple informational notices, but precisely crafted information packets designed to elicit specific behavior.
Yes, some advertising is like you say. Inform a consumer about a product. Most of it isn't like that. It's often emotionally manipulative, pressing heavily on social engineering. They make you feel smelly, ugly, fat, antisocial, abnormal, unlikeable, and just downright uncool -- unless you buy their product, at which point you will be a high status individual showered with potential mates in your expansive home while living a life of idle leisure.
At least, that's how about half the ads on TV make me feel.
The entire industry is a blight on the human condition. We only permit it because we're a society that glorifies exploitation and predation in the name of almighty mammon.
If everyone in advertising and marketing died in their sleep tonight the world would be a markedly better place tomorrow.
I've gone to some lengths to remove as many ads from my life as I can and discoverability is a real problem. There are times when I only hear about something I'm very interested in long after others have and there's likely things I'd buy, but I don't even know it exists as an option. Even with that problem, it's still worth it to me to shut out as much of that manipulation and noise as I can.
I can recite the entire Burger King “Whopper song” and I will never step foot inside a Burger King for as long as I live. I can hum every major insurance carrier’s jingle and tell you the characters they commonly use in their ads. I’ve been quoted by all of them and have the best deal for me. I can tell you the phone number for the local payday lender and I’ll never take a payday loan. Yet all of these occupy space in my brain through no choice of my own.
To me, the issue is that advertising is, from the consumer perspective, pushed on me rather than sought out. You can see from the asymmetry of that power dynamic that advertising is not to the benefit of the consumer. Even the order in which you phrased your comment, “connecting products to potential consumers”, is exactly right, and reflective of the problem. You phrase it as if the product is a living entity enamored with the idea of being brought home by a loving consumer; the reality is the consumer is the human, and the consumer should be driving the interaction.
In a consumer-centric universe, the consumer could seek out solutions to their problems and find products. Instead, advertising prioritizes the need of products (and the companies who sell them) to be connected to consumers, over the humans who apologists like you attempt to claim the system is benefiting.
Addicts develop a whole suite of triggers that they have to suffer through when they quit, ranging from a specific freeway exit on their commute to literally just seeing a carton or someone smoking. Each trigger is an opportunity to relapse and just having less of them, especially when first quitting, is a huge deal.
Nowadays, even showing someone smoking in movies or on TV is taboo. I think there'd be a revolt if we tried to ban alcohol on screen completely but IMO that's the next step after banning advertising. Seeing someone enjoy a drink on TV is one hell of a trigger.
Several categories of show would basically cease to exist, which is an interesting thought experiment.
I really think ads are the better target. It's much easier for a recovering addict to avoid watching things featuring heavy alcohol use than it is to avoid endless beer billboards on their daily commute.
Depends on the person. Along my commute the cannabis dispensaries have long outbid all the alcohol and casino billboards and I don't watch broadcast TV or browse the internet without uBlock Origin so I don't ever see alcohol ads. Alcohol is all over TV shows though - for example I'm currently watching Parks and Rec in the background and they get down right plastered a lot.
To be clear: I don't think it's practical to ban depictions of drinking since no one has jurisdiction to prevent e.g. streaming companies or twitch streamers from putting whatever they want in their content. I don't think it's worth seriously crippling an art's ability to depict reality accurately.
I'm thinking something like the "essential function" requirement like in GDPR: if it's a show about wine tasting and food pairing, obviously there's no way to avoid depiction of drinking - that's the whole point of the show. If it's a scene where the cast goes to the bar to celebrate a birthday or something, drinking alcohol is fine but there shouldn't be any mention of brand names or other related product placement. The set and setting should be appropriate. For example, the Parks and Rec staff drink way too much alcohol in the office. Why are they depicting government workers drinking at work? They'd have all gotten fired long ago
Until vapes came along, smoking tobacco essentially became taboo to most of the people I knew when I was in high school and college (only a few years ago).
For a while in my generation, a small minority did.
Now though, everyone vapes.
Imagine if an anti-alcohol campaign was that effective, where among those of age, only a small group drank and a vast majority never had a drop.
It doesn't solve all alcohol-related issues ans we're still among the biggest drinkers in the world but the consumption has been almost divided by two in 40 years, so I'd call it a success.
[1] the only exception being in print, and the ads themselves are very limited (no sex, no party, no lifestyle: you can pretty much just show the bottle and that'd it)