This article has quite a cynical tone that I can't say I agree with. The argument that advertising is the business of harvesting customers' attention, while not necessarily incorrect, is disingenuous. The ad industry is not some diabolical entity that conspires to brainwash citizens of the world.
I would posit that the advertising market is actually quite efficient as opposed to being a market failure. Let's examine a paragraph from the market failure section:
> Movie theatres, cable channels, phone apps, bill-board operators, and so on price the sale of your attention at what it takes to extract it from you - namely, how easy it is for you to escape their predations. This is often much lower than the value to you, or to others, of directing your attention to something else.
The author makes the implicit assumption that advertisements automatically garner 100% of our attention. They don't. When was the last time you went to a movie theater before the previews started, sat silently, and stared at the advert loop? You probably have never done that! Instead, you give your attention to your loved ones or your phone. And maybe you'll watch the previews, but if you're even somewhat into watching newly released movies, those add value to you.
Some advertisements do capture our attention, and those are priced appropriately. Super Bowl commercials cost more on a CPM basis than a commercial to be aired during the Walking Dead, which in turn costs more than an Instagram sponsored story. This is the sign of an efficient market, not a market failure.
Moreover, people do avoid advertisements when they deem it necessary. Some people buy the premium versions of iPhone applications, some people only watch new TV shows on Netflix, and some people pay extra to watch live sports events on an ad-free Internet stream. Again, this is the sign of an efficient market, not a market failure.
You could, instead, possibly make the argument that advertising is a prisoner's dilemma. Perhaps the world would be better off without advertising. (I'm not even sure that this is true, given that advertising does benefit people.) But if there are no advertisements and a single company ran a TV spot, it would be at a huge competitive advantage. So everyone runs marketing campaigns. I really think this benefits the consumer more than the author gives credit for, however. Marketing is the field of creating value for a specific segment of the population, who in turn will enter into a long-term relationship with your firm and give you economic value in return. Advertising is an important part of this.
Also, to be clear, I don't advocate for marketing strategies that themselves are disingenuous. Moreover, there are perfectly valid arguments to make that inference-based advertising are immoral, or that Internet tracking is immoral. But the author is painting with absolutely massive brush strokes against the entire field of "advertising," and I feel the need to strongly qualify his argument.
There's a lot I want to say about this piece, because it seems that the author fundamentally misunderstands marketing. The entire bit about advertisers charging consumers directly is a terrible business idea, for example, for the same reason that we have grocery stores and shopping malls. However, I don't really want to spend all afternoon on a point-by-point response.