By what other means would people with a product or service to provide reach other people who are interested in obtaining that product or service?
How often does an actual random advertisement shown on a billboard or a preroll youtube ad actually lead to a quality product? I think it is fairly common for people who are acquiring the best versions of things to do so primarily through research in forums or reviews, which is coming from the user looking from the product, rather than the product forcing itself into the mind of a given user to convince them to consume it.
There definitely wasn't prior art of entire industries building themselves up out of nothing by making something that was self evidently good and selling it to like five turbo nerds who made sure everyone they found wanted it.
That industry is definitely not for example the software services industry before about 2000, and there definitely isn't a huge trove of examples of literally two guys in a garage building software, sometimes mediocre software, and selling it to niche businesses.
That's definitely not the, like, founding narrative of our entire sector of the economy or anything.
There definitely wasn't such a thing like trade magazines where you could browse a vague and generic interest and find all sorts of awesome and expensive and niche products to buy for your hobby, like low production run test equipment or literal scams built by weird guys in a garage, again.
China definitely doesn't have a clear current example of a huge industry that runs basically from a bunch of guys with a box of junk in a stall in a giant physical building that westerners literally go to as a niche tourist destination that drives a bunch of niche product development.
No no, we definitely need to let Google rewrite the very words in front of your face to sell you whatever the highest bidder wants to sell you. How else could you possibly find things?
But the truth is most modern products aren't good enough to earn word of mouth.
A good example of how to work it right is Steam: while it is not perfect, most discussions give them benefit of doubt because most of the time they do work for the best interest of their customers, not just themselves.
What is the monthly magazine they send me, then?
I've got mine jack!
lol
Fake
However, you can have e.g. a magazine that lists computer parts if you want to buy that (as mentioned by another comment), or in a restaurant that has a sign on the wall (or a printed menu) indicating new items, or a news paper might have a section relating to restaurants or movies or whatever else you might want to buy, or there might be publications that specialize in these things if you are deliberately trying to look for them. They should not need to put advertising anywhere, and they should not need to make it excessive or abusive or dishonest like they do, etc.
(Products that they advertise way too much often have some problems other than just the advertising, too.)
Say I have this stunning webshop with margins smaller than bezos toilet breaks. How do I survive out there in the jungle?
You don't. Because you don't get to manipulate my attention. That simple.
That’s opt in advertising.
But you as the advertiser is not happy with that
Today it should be online, but then, imagine having to curate Amazon where hundreds of sellers appear and dissapear each month selling the exact same product.
People have plenty of other ways of finding out about useful products and services. You can talk to your friends and family, or go to a store and talk to a salesperson, or look up product reviews online, or even pay for something like a Consumer Reports subscription.
When the metric is "make sales and make as much money as possible", it will be incredibly difficult to avoid bias from people with a vested interest in selling you something. This is why advertising (admittedly, mixed with our current society) is so insidious: it's very hard to find a third party that isn't trying to profit off of you buying something.
Any evidence of this?
Hell, one of our best known lawyers in the entire state is a freaking injury liability one.
But hey, direct evidence of lack of harm never seems to stop all the cockroaches coming out of the woodwork insisting that the world fails if we can't have our eyeballs sold to the highest bidder at every second, and that a different world is just impossible. Gee, I wonder if those people are just ignorant, or maybe have some motivated reasoning, like if most of them were paid entirely by advertising revenue.
In my opinion, it would take quite a lack of imagination to ask such a question.
There's many many ways to reach people who want your product. Industry-relevant news publishers and conferences, professional/personal anecdotes (eg, blogs and recommendations), demonstrations and training offers, etc.
A different question would be: by what other means would businesses force their products on people who don't want them? Hopefully the answer is: none.
A cursory search shows that the average person is exposed to ~5000 ads a day in the US. Everyone is screaming for your attention. It's not healthy.
Unsolicited advertising is what everyone hates.
If I go onto my grocery store website and see "we have a sale on xyz" I'm not bothered because I went to that website to see what they have. I'm also not bothered by sales displays in the store. All forms of acceptable advertising.
But what I absolutely hate is navigating a webpage unrelated to my store and seeing "Did you know you can buy widgets at your local store!" or watching youtube and seeing an unskippable 30 second ad for my store. Or getting a newspaper that is actually just 90% advertisement with 2 paragraphs of actual news.
I wonder whether you would consider ads for fashion houses in a fashion magazine to be "solicited" or "unsolicited"?
The only thing I would consider solicited is when I decide that I want to see product information. Everything else is just some chapter from the narcissists prayer: "and if I did, it wasn't that bad"
My parents are STILL in that mind-set - TV "tells you" about stuff - and TV never lies!!
They're seeing more and more advertising during their "shows". And sadly, becoming more and more susceptible to it as they age - like the thousands of dollars of "apocalypse food buckets" they bought from some televangelist. Most of which they had to leave behind when they moved into the retirement community (ignoring the rationality of buying it in the first place).
Sometimes you could also talk to people in a shop about what you were really trying to accomplish and they'd give you advice on what you might need or how you could do it.
The 'need' end is the perspective that's most useful to society. How can someone who has a need find out to satisfy it?
Make your product able to be found by those who need it. Don't shove it in the faces of everyone.
One problem with the above is the effectiveness of making 'unnecessary' sales by creating fomo by shoving it in the faces of everyone. This effectiveness, however, is evidence of the fact that it's psychological manipulation / abuse.
I think you'd need to more directly and clearly define "need." Do you mean only utilitarian companies and products should exist? What about the things I don't "need" but just "like?" What about music? How do I find new music? How do I know I like something before I've even discovered it? Should music radio, which is just an abstract form of album advertising, not exist at all?
I'm torturing the point, but outside of centralized market control, I'm not sure you can apply this logic across the entire scope of capitalism.
Certainly I don’t have adverts when I check my email, does Hotmail etc do adverts now? I’m sure they didn’t back in the early 00s.
YouTube premium might be a better counterargument—but I’m not sure how many people are buying it just for ad removal versus buying it to get access to additional games/movies/content. Is that data available? I’d be interested in checking it out if so!
Unacceptable ad: Everything seen everywhere.
Word of mouth is not advertising. What your friends like is something you might like too.
Catalogue listings and databases are not advertising. You can search those for terms closely associated with what you're looking for.
The internet is more than just ads.
Certainly we wouldn't be better off if advertising were beamed 24/7 at full blast into your ears and eyes the second you step out into any public space.
About 5% of its current proliferation would be a nice target to aim for - maybe a maximum of 200 ads a day[1] - but if that still proves to be an issue, we could always go lower.
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[1] With maybe five rising to the level of notice.
Easy: provide informational material. I will fetch it if/when I'm interested. Don't stick it up my nose while I try to do something else
Classifieds hasn't been a thing in newspapers since the 2000s, at least where I live. Any classifieds website isn't advertising in any meaningful sense of the term. It's much closer to a database than an ad.