How would you know where a restaurant is or what it serves if they did not have a logo or a menu located outside on their window? All of this is advertising.
What is immoral is advertising that holds your attention hostage. Advertising should be able to be rejected, or skipped.
I don't have to read a billboard. I don't want to stare at it for 5 seconds before saying "Skip Billboard". I just don't look at it.
Instagram does a great job of this with Reels. I can just swipe past a reel that's an ad. I can't even tell you what the last ad I saw on Instagram was, period.
In my opinion, advertising should be an inefficient way of communicating your services / products. Commercials, in-stream ads, popups, anything that forces you to interact with an advertisement should be banned, and any personalization of advertisements should also be banned.
Samsung should hire me to design their next smart city, imo.
Dear god, please save us from having clear, concise, and honest product information to inform our purchasing decisions. In this hellish existence, I might not even be able to know by default which toothbrush will make people think highly of me.
"Familiarity" and "Familial" share the same root. Our children resemble ourselves and our relatives. When I see my son's smile, I see my father's. When he giggles, I hear my wife's laugh. In history, our villages and regions are more self-similar than any two random people in the world. Inwardly, these similarities and recognitions trigger love and care, and outwardly they play a role in sustaining familial and cultural trust. We should always question and challenge that role, and increase our circle of empathy, it is repugnant to justify racism as some do with this line of reasoning. But the effects are there and it is counterproductive that by selling prominence and placement which even our own families can't match, we allow brands to purchase a kind of kinship.
The way I see it it's a consenting relationship between sellers and consumers; good for companies/artisans, good for consumers, good for the economy, good for the spread of new technology, good for the environment (second hand marketplaces).
I've not yet found out how to withdraw my consent for seeing ads when I'm walking in the street.
PS to answer your question:
>What's wrong with advertising in general exactly?
Have a look at the psychological techniques that are used in ads. Many many ads are based on inciting fear, so even if they "don't work" on you in the sense of getting you to buy a product, they might still work on you in the sense of inciting fear. They even managed to sell candy bars based on fear: if you're hungry you might get grumpy and will be socially ostracized. Air fresheners are sold with the message that people will dislike you if your house stinks. Ads for gambling usually target sad and lonely people in a pretty obvious way ("if you win the lottery you'll have friends").
There are other techniques too. Teenage body image issues resulting from ads have been well documented. Etc.. etc.. etc. There's armies of well-paid psychologists working on getting under your skin every which way, using focus groups, sociological research, brain scans...
The goal of advertising is to induce a feeling of dissatisfaction which can be relieved by giving money to the advertiser. Making a profit by encouraging people to experience the suffering of unfulfilled desire does not strike me as an especially virtuous practice.
> it's a consenting relationship
Not hardly, not most of the time! Perhaps one could argue that I have consented to advertising if I have picked up a trade magazine, but public advertising is intrusive and always unwanted, as far as I'm concerned. I block it when I can, ignore it when I must, avoid it always, and I applaud those who vandalize billboards.
This is so outlandish that I feel you almost must be trolling. It's explicitly not consentual. I don't want to see ads. Any ads. Any ads at all. Never. I would be perfectly happy never seeing a single ad in my life and I am 100% confident that I would never regret that choice. I go to great lengths to make myself as annoying as possible to advertisers, making gdpr requests, using browsers that refuse all cookies even when it means I have to constantly sign in and/or automate consent forms, asking for breakdowns of all data stored on me etc.
Despite all this, I still see at least two or three dozen ads every day.
The idea that ogling even the most innocuous forms of advertising reduces your quality of life to the point the government has to step in and prevent everyone else from benefiting from them sounds excessive.
we've gone from "a consentual and loving relationship which is useful for society" to "well some parts of it aren't THAT painful, so why complain?" real fast...
> prevent everyone else to benefiting
nobody benefits. Not even companies. It's a zero sum game. Spend more than your competitor to get an edge.
However it's fairly consistent that on my short walk to work ill see two or three ads plastered on busses (well usually several per bus but we'll be kind and count them as one), and maybe a dozen adverts on the side of buildings, billboards, adverts and bus stops, random advert screens on the pavement, and more. I'll also often see posters for upcoming concerts and stickers for local shops and venues attached to lampposts, electrical boxes, walls, the floor, any surface. Often they are layered on top of older ones several deep.
The posters are fine, honestly even a little charming by their lack of permanence and by comparison to the offensive eyesore digital screens exhorting me to buy junk food I have already heard of pretty much every day for my entire life. But I wouldn't miss them. I can find lists of all upcoming concerts in my area with no effort at all.
I'm in an airport right now and can easily count a dozen ads in my field of view, even counting the two large ad carousel displays as one apiece. I'm sure I encountered hundreds on my way to this gate.
I did however mostly speak about ads on the internet, because that's what I thought the OP was talking about.
I'd see that number of ads in a single 100m walk downtown.
However I mainly spoke about online ads because that's what I thought OP was talking about.
Modern advertising is about manipulating emotions on a global scale.
Like, there's nothing wrong with advertising to let people know "I'm here, I do/sell a thing. Here's why I'm objectively different than where you get that thing now"
The problem in my mind is we start lying, we manipulate, we use each others weakness and vulnerability against each other, and we want infinite growth/results. Surely in business and society there's a sort of happy medium where you serve a need to your community and the community pays a fair price that enables a reasonable living at minimum?
But to me it seems you achieve that not by banning, but in a perfect world by creating a culture that doesn't abuse itself, and in a more realistic world I suppose attempting to legislate rules and guidelines that protect the general public from the money addicted.
Fundamentally, ad markets can't hide from enforcement, so long as whoever's buying the ads is a commercial entity interacting with the financial system. Which it usually is: the primary reason to buy ads is to boost sales of something that's being sold on the open marketspace, overtly and conspicuously. (If it's being advertised, it must be conspicuous, right?)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_Whistleblower_Office?usesk...
[late edit]: In short—if society wants to ban ads, that's a thing that's enforceable and difficult to evade.
How would you enforce laws against shills? Doesn't many influencer work for free samples etc? I am way more worried for misuse of such laws than shills in the first place. I'd rather people just don't trust celebrities for consumer advice.
By the letter of the law, that's a form of remuneration, and is mandatory to disclose.
- "A “material connection” to the brand includes a personal, family, or employment relationship or a financial relationship – such as the brand paying you or giving you free or discounted products or services."
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/disclosures-... ("Disclosures 101 for Social Media Influencers")
I don't like advertising, but this sounds awful.
What counts as "advertising"?
Why can't groups of people climb up an attention gradient and build things?
Lots of useful things could not exist without advertising.
- "Why can't groups of people climb up an attention gradient and build things?"
Why should the attention gradient be an auction market?
How do developed countries stop people cutting their products with cheaper alternatives?
How do we enforce weights and measures legislation so every shop visit doesn't require you to lug along your own standard weights and scales?
How do we stop investments being all scams (ok so this one has failed a bit in the US.)
The answer is competent regulation with active enforcement. Tie reviews to a government issued ID. Enforce stiff penalties for any company found to be pissing in the communal data pool.
We do not need tech innovators, corporations or pioneering extroverted CEOs to market-innovate solutions to the problems we have. We can simply lean on expertise and scientific consensus and mandate that it apply to various industries and our world as a whole, and drive society forward. The legal pen has power too and we can use it for more than just ensuring Disney has infinite copyrights, and in fact, should.
It's not going to fix everything, of course. But a lot of major issues could see huge improvements if we simply used our Governmental processes to demand them. We KNOW how to make vehicles more efficient. We KNOW how to reduce other emissions. We KNOW that certain building practices and city policies are making numerous social ills worse. We know all of these things and we know how to stop them, but our politicians are content to ride out the collapse and cash their checks in the meantime and retire before the world falls apart.
None of these problems are really new and have been looked for millennia by now.
"Let's ban advertising" "How?" "Laws" "It's depressing people can't think of this" "Enlightened dictatorship isn't going to help"
…suggests thinking in a false dichotomy. We don't need a dictatorship, enlightened or otherwise, to have laws.
(No Brexit jokes allowed :P)
(Whether they care about the risk or see it as an opportunity for enriching themselves, that's a separate matter).
"How do you get legislation passed to regulate advertising when it controls almost every media and social media platform through which voters can get informed on the topic?"
And if you have an answer to that I'd dearly love to hear it - I work at a campaign for electoral reform in the UK and we have near enough the exact same problem.
I'm not saying that's the answer. I'm not saying it's not the answer.
Ads appeal to the lowest of the low of human animalistic desires to buy the "cheapest" shit shipped all the way across the world while their neighbors struggle to make a living producing the same kind of product.
I totally agree, advertising is antisocial and unethical by definition.
That said: I don't think of "public information campaigns" as advertising, yet also I mention this specifically because I can see the poorly defined boundary between awareness and manipulation — most advertising feels to me like government propaganda, just from a different master, and propaganda can be information as well as disinformation.
Get off this internet. Go get a meetup, buy an island. build some buildings. build your own super anti-social internet on your island. View webpages made by your neighbors on the "east side" of the island.
oh, and stop using products that exist because advertising has allowed the funding to make them exist. or - just move to n korea.
But to your point I guess in the near future with AR.
On a more whimsical level brick-n-mortars could have signage on the non-visible light spectrum and opting in could be using some wearable to enable visibility.
edit clarity
I’d love to ban ads from public spaces and most of the internet.
Look in the mirror bud. You joined a site that’s a marketing/advertising campaign for a VC firm 10 years ago and have commented dozens (perhaps hundreds) of times.
The person you responded to even alluded to other more consumer friendly modes of advertising that could be tolerated and encouraged.
You'll have a much better time of you adjust your expectations to meet the likely reality rather than beating your head against it.
It's more important to understand how democracies, governments, and business work than to understand long division.
The reality is we need advertising to enable discoverability. No advertising = no new businesses = back to medieval, pre-growth times.
If you like earning a living and ensuring your physical safety using your mind rather than physical bulk, you need to understand that this is only possible in an economy that is partially idea-based. How can this work if ideas and information aren't allowed to spread? How can new ideas and new information enter the fray if things like advertising is banned?
no we don't. i live a near advertisement free life, and its great.
no radio or tv, block all internet ads. the one ads i see are the ones in the physical world like billboards.
never once has an ad been the reason i "discovered" something, and i discover all sorts of new products/services naturally in my life.
if anything ads make actually make it so hard because they never can be trusted, often full of lies, and wading through all that to find the truth can be hard and is often why i don't actually go out and buy a new product cataogry.
That is a little bit absurd.
Maybe the person you're talking about is on to something. Why not ban advertising? We could just list products and services in directories as is done with small business. It'd let startups compete more effectively by placing them next to the offerings of behemoths, with no presentational difference between the two. It'd be an amazing leveller between capital intensive enterprises and the rest.
(That's also probably why it won't happen)
We could simply list each plan for how society must function along with it's cost in taxes and then pick which plan we'd like to pay for / obey.
Or we could do away with the sinister notion that there is someone with the natural authority to ban things like this.
Because we can’t ban everything doesn’t mean we shouldn’t earnestly try. It’s not a viable option, but the lesson must be relearned every generation or so. It’s always self-nullifying. People want safety, but need freedom.
I've taken both.
maybe MAYBE 1% of the ads I see on any given day are for discoverability.
But lets be real tracking cookies aren't there to figure out if you already know about a service. Advertising isn't about discoverability.
> How can new ideas and new information enter the fray if things like advertising is banned?
You're asking "if people can't pay to force other people to see things, how would anyone ever find anything?" The answer is that most "finding" is done because someone wants something, not because they are made to want it. When someone wants something, they usually start by looking for where that thing is. There are numerous resources for achieving this outside of advertisements. Of course companies will optimise these avenues, the old call-your-company-acme-to-be-at-front-of-phone-book or whatever. That's fine, so long as they aren't paying to put stuff in places other than where im literally searching for the service they offer.
In other news, this amazingly staggerly large buisness, literally the biggest economy sector in the world, is laughably ineffective. Ask most people about the companies in any given sector and they can name only one or two.
That is authoritarian. Let people decide for themselves. I promise they are capable of making the right choices.
Anyway, the industry so far imo just brings >95% harm and bad and unnecessary stuff over humanity, and grabs my attention unasked everywhere, even where I kind of didn't opt in.
What btw about laws where certain advertisements were forbidden, e.g. alcohol or tobacco, or lottery, also in western countries.. that's not authoritarian but protecting children, right at least?
Who is making which choice, exactly?
I don't get to decide which adverts are presented to me. Best I can do is install ad blockers and get almost all of them… or campaign for laws.
Governments already have some rules about what is and isn't allowed in advertising, and block certain categories entirely — for example, the UK bans all cigarette advertising everywhere.
I don't know about the USA; I assume liquor and gambling have some rules, but that's just an assumption.
Advertising is just business owners saying "My product exists, look at it, you might find it useful!". Without it, product discovery has to be be a top down directory which means relying on someone's judgement instead of the market, which has basically been shown to be inferior at scale everywhere it's been tried.