Ask Lemmy

I see the following issue:

What is an ad? Is it an ad spot in the middle of a TV show? A big billboard? A banner on a website? Someone talking about a brand? Just writing or saying a brand name? Subtle algorithmic nudging?

You gotta put a line in the sand, and depending on where you put it, it'll be harder to influence anyone or harder to address brands or products. There's always a trade off.

And then additionally we gotta address any behavioural adaptions of big companies. Imagine if companies started striking illegal deals with social media companies for favourable algorithms? How do you control that? And on the other hand, imagine you were talking about a product and suddenly people accuse you of illegal advertising? How do you make sure people don't skirt the line and also no one is wrongly convicted?

I'm not saying this is a dumb idea, I actually agree cracking down on forceful or manipulative advertising is an interesting idea, I just think that these broad stroke ideas an insane amount of continuous planning, validation and readdressing.

Step 1. Create a great marketing campaign to sell your idea!

From near Nashville Tennessee through North Alabama and Mississippi to the Louisiana border there exists a 444-mile roadway called the Natchez Trace Parkway. The only signage you will see is related to non-commercial scenic viewpoints. No billboards. No businesses. Nothing but forests and fresh air. Furthermore, no commercial traffic is allowed whatsoever on the full length of the byway, and the authorities strictly enforce that rule.

It's glorious. Waterfalls, walking and biking trails, Indian mounds, and miles and miles of advertising-free roadway.

https://www.natcheztracetravel.com/

I'm running a one person handyman business that would die instantly if I wasn't allowed to advertise. Nobody would even know I exist.

Some places already ban physical ads. There are better sources than these but this is what I found so far:

• https://medium.com/@Kyoto_After_Tokyo/kyoto-banned-outdoor-ads-what-it-gained-was-deeper-than-silence-c1ba8d8b40eb

• https://blog.wego.com/what-happens-when-a-megacity-bans-ads/

Digital ads would be harder to get rid of. At the individual level, it's relatively easy to disable an adblocker if something breaks. That's harder to do if you block it city wide.

A PSA campaign might work better to get people to turn on adblockers

God knows I'm hostile to the marketing shit filled world we live in, but ads are... there would not even be a society without the ability to advertise, aka to share information (be it paid for or not) with other people.

The issue, my issue, is with marketing.

Any insight into this besides useful idiots saying advertising is good or necessary would be greatly appreciated!

A single one? That may be too little to be helpful but here it is: insulting people is probably not the best way to attract them to you cause.

edit: typos/ missing word

Within the US, the states of Maine, Vermont, Alaska & Hawaii all have a ban billboards. The general logic behind it is, "They ugly, nature pretty." So as long as you live somewhere where "nature pretty" fits, you can probably argue based on that logic.

However no matter how far you stretch that argument, it probably only goes as far as public goods. Once we get into private business I don't think you'll have much luck.

As you walk into your nearest grocery store the outside might be covered in ads. Buy Pepsi. Buy Coke. Half off generic cola!

You pop into your local diner and the placemats have advertisements for a dozen local mechanics.

I've thought about this quite a bit and really consider advertising to be a form of assault on attention. The presumption that companies are entitled to our attention without our consent feels like an attack on our own agency.

Before we get to banning advertising though we first need to figure out how to connect people to businesses that have goods and services they actually want to seek out. Word of mouth is great, but it's insufficient. We need some sort of directory. The yellow pages were surprisingly functional, but some modern accessibility and ability to update info is needed. I think the 10,000 pound gorilla in this space is Google maps. However, alphabet is fundamentally an advertising company at this point and prioritizes selling ad placement over user experience. Could organic maps eventually serve as a searchable business directory? I'm not sure. I think any open source initiative would quickly be ruined if companies thought that rigging that system woild get them more customers.

Is a public option viable? I'm not sure. There's a lot of equal access and gatekeeping concerns there. We shouldn't allow obvious scams to be listed, but what's the threshold and who makes that determination? Is someone's Mary Kay mlm a legitimate business or scam? The potential for corruption is very high in an endeavor like this. Imagine if someone is buddies with an administrator and can get their competition completely delisted. Such an endeavor would likely face lots of litigation over claims of unfair treatment.

Many companies I think would be eager to stop paying for advertising if they had a means of connecting to customers that was effective and lower cost, but to achieve this, you're literally trying to compete with the entirety of google/alphabet.

Assuming you're in America, it's impossible to outright ban ads.

You can make whatever laws you want, but those laws can't supersede the Constitution. And the Constitution says that companies and people have the right to free speech. And that the government, I.e the laws you just created, can't infringe on that (with some reasonable exceptions).

At best you can make certain advertising types illegal. I lived in a wonderful town that banned roadway signs, for example. You could ban billboards over a certain height. You could regulate the color palette used for signs on shops. You could say no signs posted on roadside easements.

So progress could be made, but not an outright ban.

Sao Paolo has a ban on outdoor advertising and it works brilliantly. There's still tons of money and commerce, but the city is so much nicer for not having all the attention-stealing visual pollution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa

Making all advertising illegal would quickly collapse society.

Why? Because for any given service, how would you even know it's available at all, let alone the people providing it?

Our entire society as of now, and for the past few thousand years, has been so complex that people need to specialise and rely on each other for a lot of things. You rely on farmers, millers, bakers, butchers, etc. to provide your daily food. You rely on bus drivers, taxicabs, etc., for your transportation. On plumbers, sparkies, et cetera all for your home maintenance needs. Not to mention companies manufacturing and selling even more complex products you buy.

Without advertisement, how would you know what restaurants are nearby? Or who can repair your broken sink? Who can come out and repair that in-wall conduit? who you can hire to build your new house? where you can go to get entertained? are we banning adverts for the local theatre's new plays? are we banning the local handyman from letting people know he provides said service?

I agree that today's overkill advertisements are an issue, exacerbated by late stage capitalism that simultaneously wants to siphon your income both before and after you receive it, that having advertisements shoved down one's throat should stop... But do you really think that banning ALL advertising is the way to go?

Unless you're proposing the absolutely moronic libertarian stance of everyone relying upon themselves only for survival and continued existence, you can't just ban all advertisements.

What would work is an incredibly heavy handed set of regulations that ensure the big players play fair, that ads aren't using various psychological tricks to make you buy new shit you don't need, that ads aren't malicious and overwhelming, and so on. But even that is a scope of discussion that needs to take place over years, with a multitude of experts involved, not just one person willy nilly going "ads are bad mmmmkay so they're now banned".

I think a ban on displaying ads in public spaces, especially big billboards, would be a really good start. A ban on online ads would be more difficult, because AFAIK ad targeting isn't actually that good; you'd think that would be their bread and butter, what all the data collection is actually about, but at least a couple of years ago it was actually really difficult to buy online ads that only get shown to people in one city (e.g. if you're a political party and want to advertise in a local election). Seems like the ad syndicalists just do whatever and then lie about it. If true, they'd need to overhaul their tech to adhere to a local-level ad ban.

Some media is also primarily paid by ads, like radio and local newspapers. Might need to subsidize those, and IDK how you'd even deal with radio and newspaper from outside of the local area - radio especially is built on the idea that access is unrestricted, and one radio antenna can service an area the size of a small country.

Banning ads seems like overkill. Going after deceptive practices aggressively and having strict regulation makes mires sense IMHO.

Just pass laws that an individual can legally opt out from ads. Then you wouldn't have companies charging you more for "ad free" (even corps think ads are a punishment (or maybe even yet another revenue stream)).

Websites, newspapers, t.v., blogs, etc. pay their workers and expenses through ads. Are you suggesting all these become pay per use?

Butbut, how would I know what to want?

Sounds like bad news for the local newspaper.

I find this idea very interesting even if it might seem kind of wacky and unrealistic in our current world.

I can see it being possible to make a somewhat-convincing "moral" case for banning advertising. The argument would go that advertising is manipulating the consumer, preventing them from making an unbiased decision. It provides an unfair advantage over the competition, since a company that spends on advertising can get more sales without improving their product or lowering prices. And it creates an environment where the competition has to respond with advertising of their own, with the end result being large advertising budgets when those resources could be used to improve the company's products or services. The case would be much weaker when it comes to small businesses, charity fundraising, political adverts and government campaigns. To be clear this is a thought experiment, no criticism of anyone involved in advertising in real life.

You can make a distinction between paid and unpaid advertising, for example a community noticeboard or directory where businesses can post for free is more acceptable because they're not gaining any unfair visibility over competitors, and consumers would only go there when they're looking for something. Like a few other people have said it would be essential to propose alternative ways that consumers can discover new products. Sadly there are probably people whose only source of information is advertising and you need to somehow give them a way to stay informed.

More realistically, limitations on advertising are either going to take the form of making specific places ad-free like you mention, or restricting advertising of certain products, kind of like how many places already ban adverts for things like gambling, tobacco, alcohol or adverts targeting children. I could easily see this being extended to anything remotely controversial, like social media or fast food.

There is no way to do that.

I dunno but it would be hard to advertise it.