So if you are selling something it's literally immoral to tell other people about it? How do you think people will ever find your store or product that you make? Just randomly stumble upon it? I'm genuinely curious.
If I visit a website with ad blockers, it has the right to block me. It’s business model will depend on whether the number of people it has to block will kill it. This means it should probably find a better business model, not force itself on everyone.
You look terrible.
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But you can fix everything with our Cure-All Elixir, and you will be made whole again... but you had better keep drinking every day, or.....
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Advertisements are no longer "we make stuff. Come here to buy stuff".
It then progressed to "people who buy our stuff feel good". But that wasn't all.
Then it progressed to non-spoken feelings when in proximity of thing.
And it turns out, that you can manufacture want of your good or service. And if you gatekeep the emotions of good, wholesome, fresh, clean, happy behind your product, you can tell people they're horrible trolls unless you buy and consume.
But even those tactics weren't enough. Now, most sales are in tech related stuff. And instead of telling people over advertisement channels, now they get pushed to your devices.
And the current stage, also known as enshittification, is also cloud-tying to guarantee captive consumers, so they can't easily leave. Cloud is the ultimate hardware and data roach motel.
So yeah, looking at the recent history of advertisements is just broken, unethical, shits on the environment, and assails human thoughts just to sell more garbage.
I am an anticapitalist, and I am acutely aware of what I am against. Advertisements, and how they solidified in the 1800s to current is one such thing I'm directly against.
I've also seen Rome Collesuem's chiseled graffiti to what amounts to "eat at restaurant". Rudimentary, when compared to hiring psychologists to extract as much wealth by exploiting the human psyche, but they were adverts nonetheless. And even those shat upon infrastructure and the humans who were there.
I do think there's a gradient of unethicalness in advertising. If I'm looking for a thing, and shown lists of things that match what I'm looking for, it's at least consensual behavior.
But these days, advertisements are anything but. They're invasive, insidious, and many a time try to fool the human that they're legitimate (and not paid) content.
But I'm guessing the emotional words you chose to use tells me you're probably in adtech.
An argument I find compelling here is as follows: sometimes I will look for something, and the world will tell me what I want does not exist. I will either build it myself or do without. If the state of the world changes, and a solution emerges, I would like that fact pushed to me (concrete example: new, more efficient battery chemistries for hot climates).
Waiting for everyone to pull slows down growth of whoever is innovating this new thing - which in turns hinders their innovation - which in turn slows down innovation in the economy.
There's a tradeoff here with all the bad things you lay out about advertising, but I'm not convinced I should prefer the more rapid rate of innovation.
Anything much above that starts to veer into the territory of paying to distort people's understanding of the market, or convince them they want things that they don't, etc.
I've taken a stance, DECADES ago, that all ads are telegraphing a very simple message: "my offering is not good enough to be discovered on its own merits, therefore I have to spend money to drown out the more worthy options".
That's kinda like assuming that because you're such a good guy, you never have to leave your basement and your future wife will find you.
You could just as well interpret advertising as "I am so convinced my offering is good, I am willing to spend money for you to become aware of it."
It is definitely not counterproductive. Mountains of evidence and real $ back the fact that advertising works.
You have a quirky pocket theory
If you want to conduct an experiment, try making a product or starting a business and don't advertise it.
It's like being in the countryside, where each inn and resting spot has a fire going on. You can spot them by their smoke trails. Then some entrepreneurial individual wants to grab market share from the punters and puts up a massive tire fire. A billowing column of black smoke will be seen from way further off, and as luck would have it, blocks visibility to anything behind it. It also makes the surrounding environment worse off for everyone.
And anyone who is attracted by the big flames will soon find themselves inhaling toxins.
But it's ok! Because I also financially benefited from it.
Yes, marketing is immoral.
Though if you reject this implication, I totally agree.
Advertising is fucking everywhere. I don't want to hear about new products and services because all of them literally just want your money. I'm not always shopping or looking for a product. I find navigating markets a massive ass pain.
We need legislation that forces advertising to the margins of society, where it belongs. We aren't just sacks of meat to be manipulated. There is nothing just about commercial communication having a louder voice than the people.
I don't understand why or how you see my question as one made in bad faith. OP said all advertising is immoral - I want to explore if they really think all advertising is immoral, or just some subset of it. Like, if you own a butcher shop and have a sign up front that says "fresh meat here!", is that immoral? If yes, why? Again, I'm genuienly curious.
Sure you do. If people are talking about cars for their families, and I have a suggestion for them based on my prior research, I'll share it. It's been raining a lot in my area recently, so lots of folks talking about which basement waterproofer they had a good experience with.
The reason these things don't feel like ads is because they are "super targeted" - I am telling someone about a product/service that I believe they would be interested in based on what I understand about them. Obviously I also don't get paid for this messaging but that's probably not the crux of the matter here. If advertising was "so good" that I would only see ads for products that are genuinely valuable and relevant to me at that time, that would be great.
Businesses that sell a lot of products that people actually want and do not end up returning. The money for advertising is not sustainable if it doesn't result in some sort of purchase down the line.