It's kind of an open secret that the city of Santa Barbara (CA, US) has banned several forms of public outdoor advertising: we have no billboards, no promotional posters, no taxi toppers... It's delightful, and very high on my list of reasons why I enjoy living here. Every time I leave I'm reminded how noisy space is when it's filled with advertisements. I wholeheartedly recommend others advocate for similar policies in their municipality - it can be done!
I wish we had that on the tube in London. Instead, you ride an escalator and see upwards of 20-maybe 30 video ads on the way. And that's before a marketing firm commissions the redesign of a tunnel so an entire stretch of walkway is 100% ad, like a shitty Disney ride. Or you arrive to one of the big terminals and gigantic screens are blasting even more ads at you. This is, of course, after you spend 40+ minutes on a train that has a continual row of adverts placed just above the eye-level of the person sat in front of you.
Then you look at what the older tube stations looked like and they're quite pretty; lots of mosaics and other works of art, each station having a distinctive style. Now it's white tiles, white LED lights, and adverts.
As someone who is highly susceptible to yawn-contagion (I literally yawned writing that's and again writing this parenthetical) the <redacted-to-not-give-them-exposure> snake oil ads showing the woman yawning are a nightmare for me, but I suspect I'm in a tiny minority
Lots of places in America have severe restrictions on advertising. Hilton Head, South Carolina; and along the Garden State Parkway in New Jersey leap to mind. I think along some of the toll roads in Houston this is also true (It's been a while, I might be remembering that wrong).
Billboards are banned in downtown Chicago, so big companies rent storefronts in tourist areas and put in stores that are not supposed to make money, just to be billboards for their brand.
I live in downtown Chicago and I find the lack of billboards everywhere refreshing. Michigan Avenue has very few advertisements with the exception of unintrusive storefront signs.
New billboards are banned in Houston anywhere (and have been for decades). So they're not along tollways, or any new road. Old ones still exist, sadly.
Hawaii has a similar ban in place too. It's so nice not being bombarded by billboards in your day-to-day life. Definitely one of the things I've missed since moving from there.
Taxi toppers are an interesting one to ban - I suppose the city can simply refuse to license taxis that refuse to sign a contract agreeing to not use toppers but any advertisement on a private not otherwise restricted vehicle would be the providence of the state DMV - possibly... I'm not certain how a lawsuit would come down trying to determine if vehicle appearance could be restricted by a state or if that right was withheld by the federal government.
With rare exceptions (mostly help-wanted signs and signs for candidates for local offices before elections) the only outdoor advertising in Marin County, CA, is on the buses, the bus shelters -- but only the shelters near highway 101 -- and retail locations advertising stuff sold there. I.e., vastly less outdoor advertising than most of the US.
Bit of a hijack but are you still working? I’ve been in LA for 15 years and the plan is to move to SB once we no longer need to work. I love everything about the area (I just did a 5 personal retreat at Lake Cachuma) but job optionality is low.
I’ll be back on Saturday and can’t wait for the peace, calm and beauty.
yes! there's a couple dozen tech companies in the area, but there's a large demographic of byo$$. happy to connect via other channels if you want a longer discussion.
thats nice. They prbly have a good tax base that doesn't need this extra revenue stream. property tax is decent enough revenue where median home is > 1 mil.
> I enjoy living here
Yea its a given that its nice to live where people earn more and live in expensive homes :D
You assume advertising somehow helps the economy, but it is probably the reverse. If business A buys ads, it's competitor B is forced to do the some, or be slowly edged out of the market. Like peacock plumes, ads are mostly a tax that weighs down every business in the area.
I see that maybe image ads are of the peacock feather type. Informative ads, like a new movie being out in theaters, can actually be net-positive financially, at the expense of the strain on public attention.
> Informative ads, like a new movie being out in theaters, can actually be net-positive financially, at the expense of the strain on public attention.
It would be easy to avoid that strain, by segregating such informative ads into places where people can seek them out on their own. Have advertising be PULL, not PUSH. Unfortunately, this is the exact opposite of what the advertising industry wants (and really, what most companies want - everyone is happy with getting a little short-term advantage at the expense of everyone else and their own future).
False premise, even more in the age of the internet. If you want to know what's the best x, where x is a phone, a flashlight, a toaster, then you can just google it anytime. In fact, it's very much the opposite: advertising enforces the status quo, since the biggest companies will be able to promote their product at a massive scale (bombardment is a better word) and monopolize attention. Small businesses get squat.
But that's not a problem, IMO. If something was good enough before, it's likely good enough still. If it stops being good enough, people will be prompted to look for alternatives, which they'll then discover. Given how it's nearly impossible to satisfy human beings, they'll start looking for options sooner rather than later.
Some argue all advertising should be banned. If that were to occur, the search burden would shift to consumers. We'd subscribe to curators like the Consumer Report or Wirecutter, storekeepers, et cetera and let them do the searching on our behalf.
This article considers something weaker. No public advertising. No billboards. Direct mail, storefront displays, in-store advertising, et cetera are still permitted.
> Direct mail, storefront displays, in-store advertising, et cetera are still permitted.
Direct mail is the worst form of advertising, from a personal perspective and from an environmental perspective. You're littering directly onto others, and forcing them to deal with trash you created in the vain hope that some of them decide to act on that trash.
It all ought to be marked "Return To Sender" and placed back into the mail stream, so the original sender has to deal with disposal. Forcing entities to internalize negative externalities is the only way to stop them from creating those externalities to begin with.
The first time I started thinking about it that way was when I bought a book featuring a selection of Banksy's works [0]. In the opening pages it had a quote of him, making pretty much that point:
The public space is ours. It's not their for corporations. It's to be enjoyed by the people and if you want to come in with your hands full of money to make something else of it you can fuck right off. He's a true artist.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
I don't see any need or moral justification for push advertising, i.e. showing advertising to people who are not looking for a certain service or product. Fine to have directories for services and products that people are actively looking for and thus choose to actively view. Not fine to push advertising on people who are not actively looking for any such services and products. I would very happily support a ban on advertising in all public spaces.
I think in the near future we'll have empirical evidence that most ads are malicious exploits of flaws in human psychology.
Ideally, all ads should be plain text listing of facts. Pictures only allowed for demonstrative purposes. And they should be listed in "Ad sections", like a phone book.
These are all true statements (the first one is subjective, I'll admit), but I suspect that many believe the effect of plain test listing of facts would only allow the third statement.
> Pictures only allowed for demonstrative purposes.
Wouldn't a photo of someone drinking a Coke and enjoying it be allowed under this rule?
Would like to see all three of your examples banned as well, because they're not statements of fact, they're opinions, of the kind you'd typically find in an ad today.
Useful listings of facts look like this:
- is carbonated (therefore acidic, refreshing, negatively impacting teeth)
- has x mg sugar per 100ml (therefore energizing to some extent, promoting weight gain)
- has x mg of caffeine per 100ml (therefore energizing to some extent)
- has Foobar taste (Foobar because I'm not sure if there's anything common with similar taste, so perhaps it's not even worth mentioning)
- it's intended to energize, refresh, help digest meals
"Will do X for you" statements are usually not true when taken at face value, and they're already manipulative. Statements of fact, lists of features, and descriptions of intended application is what I'd like to see instead.
The law could be written so that individuals could sue companies that advertise with opinions rather than facts. Kind of like ow ADA laws are set up in California. The bureaucracy would be the court system.
False advertising is already prosecuted. So specifically here we need to adjust the "reasonability" interpretation.
If they say Coca-Cola is refreshing, and I found it's not, courts now say it is reasonable to assume that the statement is subjective. If the reasonability test is changed they will no longer be able to advertise opinions.
Can individuals sue for false advertising? If it was easy and inexpensive for regular people to file suit against big companies I think it would change they way they advertise.
I agree with you. And I suspect 9 out of 10 doctors do as well.
I want to neuter advertising more than anything, but I can't think of any kind of "rule" we could establish that would make public mind hacking illegal.
Maybe we're focused too much on the content of the advertising rather than methodology of advertisement. First and foremost advertising is paid speech, that is speech that would not otherwise be made if one party was not being compensated in some way or another. Obviously this definition has tons of edge cases, but it's a good starting point IMO.
While all of those coca cola ads are "true", they would be limited in scope to places that coca cola owns. So no bus stations or taxi toppers or whatever, unless they buy a fleet of taxis.
What if we mandated that companies can only use their revenues for the company's purpose or given to the shareholders? I consider "ads" on company property part of the company's purpose here as they're necessary so the customer knows what company they're dealing with.
- Ads would be implicitly banned.
- Coca Cola couldn't bypass this rule by buying a taxi fleet because they aren't a taxi company.
- Newspapers could still operate even though journalists get paid for speech.
It could also help against other problems, depending on how narrow the purpose of a company has to be:
- ISPs have no incentive to violate net neutrality by privileging their own value added services (streaming etc) because their ISPs not streaming providers.
- If you subscribe to a folder that syncs you know that it will remain a folder that syncs. The behind it won't pivot to something you neither want not need, bloating the software till it bursts.
- Similarly: No incredible journeys anymore. Products don't get discontinued because they get in the way of $CORPORATION's plans.
- Chosing services because they aren't owned by Facebook actually works.
- Open protocols would be a thing again if we decouple clients and services. Edge case: Someone initially has to develop a client, a server and the protocol.
The idea is that by separating concerns, we enable customers to decide where their money goes and to freely chose between goods and services without getting artificially locked into any corporation's ecosystem.
you don't need any hardcoded rules. When in doubt have a local municipal office or whatever decide whether to take down ads or not based on residential complaints.
Consensus and some common sense and case by case judgement ought to be enough to decide whether ad placement is appropriate.
This doesn't work from a first amendment perspective. The town council is BFE, Mississippi is not going to approach its censor role in a fair way, for better or worse.
Facts and advertisements are like apples and oranges. The notion of "plain text listing of fact" is pretty vague, though I'd personally classify none of those above statements as "plain text listing of facts", and all of them could be advertisements in the right context.
An advertisement is a communication designed to manipulate its recipient. Whether it's "true" or not is neither here nor there. In fact, a lot of advertisements are complete non-sequiturs, because those kinds of statements are less likely to make the listeners/viewers think critically about the statements.
This is highly misleading as it will not under normal use. It is acidic just like orange juice. The rest of your phrases, while subjective, work under normal use.
The movie “The Invention of Lying”, where everyone tells the truth (as lying hasn’t been ‘invented’) has an example of this. “Please drink Coca Cola. It’s basically just brown sugar water.”
They didn't used to be flaws. They used to be cognitive shortcuts that helped people make decisions quickly with incomplete information.
Then John B. Watson and the study of behaviorism came along in the early 20th century. Persuasion techniques were systematically identified and studied, and with the advent of mass media (TV, radio, internet), the cognitive shortcuts meant for neighbors and friends (tribe members) to persuade each other became flaws to abuse on a massive scale for profit and political power.
I think it's well recognized by anyone who is interested in this stuff that persuasion techniques are an abuse of human psychology. Cialdini's books are perhaps the most famous. Everyone merely tells themselves, "other people are doing it, and their products or ideas are worse, so we have to."
For those who haven't been to Paris, there's moving/jittering electronic signs everywhere like something out of Minority Report. They're a distracting eyesore and should be banned.
Compared to most global city I've seen (NYC, Amsterdam, Zurich, German cities, Tokyo, Singapour, Bankgok, London...) I'd say Paris is of the least 'technological' kind.
It's actually so distinct that as a nerd I just don't feel 'home' in France, architecturally, culturally, compared to most comparable countries/cities on any continent. France feels somewhat stuck in time, which you may not be able to tell looking at all the smartphones and 1Gb fiber, but could glimpse at by talking with enough locals: they just don't like / trust / see value in high-tech in general, more like a threat / disturbance / forced upon them). Again, this is the feeling, the mindset, not 'reality' or 'objective truth' (the French are the same as everyone else in this regard, obviously; I'm talking about perceptions here, like the fact that the French are the most pessimistic on Earth despite their incredible relative wealth (less than 1% of the world's population for 3.25% GDP) and quality of life (GINI, whatever).
It's great that Paris and the French exists for those who'd rather live in a more 'vintage' environment (this can be said for a lot of European small/mid cities btw), but subjectively, France is everything but high-tech or 'nerdy' compared to Germany, UK, USA, Japan (probably topping it all), Korea, basically the world's top 10-15-20 countries (GDP per capita). Even Switzerland, which is very old-school in a lot of ways, feels more "21st century" than France in day-to-day living.
But also most of the billboards are ads for cultural events, theatre, city-organised events, museums etc. I quite like that actually, where else would I find about some shows or things to do.
All of that is also great too, but I find it’s less of a waste to print a dozen of billboards at strategic locations vs. printing hundreds of thousands of newspapers and spam peoples mailboxes.
In Lausanne specifically, those billboards are also works of art in their own right so I do enjoy them.
Good on them. In Los Angeles, the tonier the neighborhood the fewer the billboards. The savagery of monster electronic signage and visual barrage increases substantially as one goes into the less affluent locations.
Well, of course. Mental pollution is just another thing poor people are subjected to, while the executives of those same advertising companies live in suburbs without a single billboard in sight.
Definitely true in America's saddle point society. A certain class will always go back to equilibrium no matter the shove, the rest fall off the sides at the slightest touch.
The poorer areas are subjected to architectural punishment, food as unhealthy as it is cheap, lack of investment and services, and pollution of all varieties. I see the "Cloud Minders" from the original Star Trek.
There was an iPhone ad draped over the Louvre a few months ago. I was shocked that the parisians of all people would debase themselves for Tim cook like that.
Yeah, the government in Victoria (Australia) forced the Sydney Opera House to accept gambling ads (for horse racing) projected onto it a few months ago.
Despite large public outcry, etc.
Definitely some money changed hands to bribe the gov people involved to make it happen. Can't see any other excuse for it.
Anyone who has taken the NYC Subway understands this sentiment. The only way to avoid them is to completely close your eyes and wish you were somewhere else.
Good on these guys. The French also are massive exporters of this garbage - Sydney is lousy with billboards inflicted on us by JC Decaux.
Amusingly enough, the JC Decaux trucks are entirely festooned with Australian flags, which is a totally conventional for a 100% French company to use as visual elements and not deceptive at all.
A general sentiment I see here is that ads should be banned, but what can be done in the US? The First Amendment protects truthful advertisements. In addition, we have the FTC for misleading and lying ads (although their success is not what it should be (case in point: OutBrain and Taboola)). So, what do we do?
Generally, the first amendment restricts the ability to enact laws banning certain types of ads over other ads, but not laws banning all ads from certain areas. For example, four states — Vermont, Alaska, Hawaii, and Maine — have banned billboard advertisements.[1] Vermont was the first to ban them in 1968[2] and these laws haven't been challenged on first amendment grounds, though presumably their passages were fought.
I should clarify the parent post - when they said "types of ads", what they really meant is the content. The 1st amendment forbids the government from discriminating on the content of a message, but they can restrict messaging in general. Though I believe there are limits to how much they can restrict that as well - a blanket ban on protests, for example, would likely not fly.
There is no part of the 1st Amendment that states that people need to read your advertising, additionally some states (like VT) have full bans on billboards - regardless of the reasoning for this that ban has been upheld and private citizens can't compel the state to allow placement of billboards on public property - there are also various style related laws (in Boston you need a special permit when constructing on Beacon Hill that makes it very difficult to build non-brick faced buildings) there is nothing illegal at a constitutional level in either of these cases. The 1st Amendment prevents discrimination of advertising (you can't chose to disallow ads for raspberries but be all in for strawberry ads because you, the mayor, find raspberries offensive) but there is no guarantee to the right of other people's attention.
Advertisements on public property can absolutely be banned and, possibly with an ordnance, I believe you could heavily restrict advertising on private property.
The government can't shut you up when expressing protected speech, but it doesn't have to help you talk, nor does it have to make people listen to you.
Perhaps common law precedent screws us over. But I don't see a problem in principle following the spirit, or even word of the written law:
1) Spying ads absolutely are more than speech: the information flow is bidirectional, and the 1st amendment isn't a right to listen.
2) It could be argued that the state cannot sell advertisements without privileging one message over another; currently "non-political ad" rules already contested, and they are even more of laughing stock beyond that once one considers that all commerce and economic activity is political. Only laws that limit the amount of messaging rather than the content are truly unbiased.
3) For private ads, while the owner of the building owns the surface where the ad is, I don't think it is fair to say they own the sight lines to the building. The problem with ADs is they can literally leave you nowhere to look when you are moving in public spaces the advertiser definitely doesn't own. I think a comparison could be made with EM spectrum law. Just because you own the antenna doesn't mean you can broadcast whatever you like. Electric adds that have their own lighting are certainly broadcasters. And if passive things like giant RFIDs are regulated, We could probably get non-illuminated ads also to be regulated.
So assuming all the above gets through the courts, we can do nothing about urinal ads in private establishments, but we can clean up public spaces completely, or at least limit them to non-illuminated ads. At that point, I hope the remaining indoor ads would be far more annoying in relative terms, and that would create some helpful economic pressure for the owner to tamp them down.
Nobody wants ads banned. The problem is that ads are being placed into previously unused places and louder than before. The result is that all companies have to compete with these new obnoxious ads or risk falling behind their competitors that are willing to put ads in distasteful places.
In my opinion, the solution is to clearly define a discrete set of spaces for ads and make sure everyone is able to compete on equal footing. It's not like these companies want to shell out more money for ads - they simply have to in order to compete.
EDIT: Also the US needs to adopt Britain's ban on election ads outside of the election month. We waste a phenomenal amount of time and money on election ads that provide zero real benefit to the US.
They provide nothing of value and exist only to sway people into buying your product - a lot of advertising isn't overtly malicious but it all exists dependent on an assumption that being told to buy a product is a more valuable use of a time than whatever else you're doing.
I suspect that being constantly bombarded with advertising has ill health effects by making it harder to find peace of mind and de-stress yourself, but that's just a gut feeling.
> They provide nothing of value and exist only to sway people into buying your product - a lot of advertising isn't overtly malicious but it all exists dependent on an assumption that being told to buy a product is a more valuable use of a time than whatever else you're doing.
I'm a prolific adblocker, but I disagree with you here. I think if things were kept at a reasonable balance, advertising would be a net positive.
There have been several times where I've tried new restaurants because of ads. Sometimes I'll go searching to buy a specific thing, and realize that it doesn't yet exist in the market. Then a few months or years later, I'll see an advertisement for that thing, and I'm always very appreciative.
That's not to mention that if ads were banned tomorrow, the established brands would have decades of advantage built up against newcomers, becoming a self-reinforcing monopoly that I'd imagine would last decades after the last person to have seen an ad dies.
And don't forget, making something illegal doesn't mean it goes away. Look at how often people accuse accounts on social media of astroturfing. Do you think that astroturfing will become more or less common after a ban on advertising? At least with ads legal I can evaluate them as ads. I can't tell which glowing reviews are legitimate and which are planted, and if you think you can I'd put money against you.
> I suspect that being constantly bombarded with advertising has ill health effects by making it harder to find peace of mind and de-stress yourself, but that's just a gut feeling.
I definitely agree with you on that. The current state of ads is nothing less than an assault on people's cognitive abilities and mental health. Something needs to give here.
> Do you think that astroturfing will become more or less common after a ban on advertising.
A ban on advertising means the company can no longer tell the employee that their job is to astroturf, or fire them for not astroturfing, because that would be a admission that the company was engaging in advertising.
Yes, it's sometimes hard to tell whether something is a advertisement or not; it's also sometimes hard tell whether something is fraud or not, but I don't hear anyone claiming we shouldn't ban fraud.
I do. I'm OK with magazine-type ads I suppose, since that's a format where advertisers can provide information to the consumer who may or may not choose to study it. If I am soliciting information about products or services through whatever medium, fair enough. Likewise I don't especially mind watching trailers when I go to the movies, since it's reasonable to think that I would be willing to consider spending money to watch other movies in the future.
But most ads are about hijacking my attention, which I greatly resent.
I look forward to the mainstream catching up to seeing advertising like second-hand smoke: harmful enough to others to ban based on widespread democratic support.
My wife did her PhD in out-of-home media (which very much included billboards).
I have yet to find a more rabid opponent to out-of-home advertising (in general) and billboards (in particular), and she will explain why it is evil at the drop of the proverbial hat...
As an amateur artist she will start with visual pollution and then veer into psychological damage... /grin
This is great. For website owners, magazines etc. it's sorta their choice to "pollute" their pages with ads, but out in the world you're polluting the commons, where people have little choice in the matter. It depletes people's ability to have a clear head & freely focus their attention.
In Lyon the public ad space was traded to an ad company in exchange for funding and maintaining the city's public bike share scheme. It's a trade off, of course, but for just 30 euros à year I (and the rest of the city) get virtually unlimited bike share.
The anti-ad groups here would be happy for the public ads to disappear but it would be a real shame if the affordable bike share went with it.
FWIW there is a real debate about who got the better side of the deal between the city and the ad company, but the Velov scheme is great. :)
They wouldn't buy the advertising if they couldn't make a profit on your attention. Pay with brain space, or pay through a tax. Which is more expensive?
It's not the brain space that's paying for the advertising, it's your (or, well, people's) buying of the advertised products. So in addition to the costs of brain space, there are still also actual financial costs to it that are borne by the city's citizens.
Well they got the product they bought, so it's a stretch to consider it a cost. Perhaps only the marginal cost that went to advertising, but it's still a stretch to consider it a cost if the buyer considers they got their money's worth.
Bit of a crypto-tangent: more than anything else, the hope of replacing advertising as the economic engine of the Internet is why I care about the cryptocurrency space. In most cases, I think crypto is a solution looking for a problem, but the capability to trade edge compute/memory/disk/network for an ad free Internet experience would be immeasurably good for our collective mental health.
Ads are disruptive. They allow new businesses to break into markets owned by old dominant suppliers. This way they keep the market healthy and serving consumers.
Based on that, you'd expect anti-ad initiatives to be aligned with powerful established industries. Not that I know how to confirm or refute that.
Ads allow whomever has the deepest pockets to dominate the public's attention. Incumbents will have more money to spend, chilling the influence of new competitors. Most of the "disruptor" success stories that come to mind started with some variation of "we didn't spend anything on advertising, relying on word of mouth."
> Ads allow whomever has the deepest pockets to dominate the public's attention.
Not necessarily. Advertising has diminishing returns -- we know this because companies don't buy unlimited advertising. If every ad dollar was as good as the first (i.e. it generated more than a dollar in profit) then everybody would buy an unlimited amount of advertising so they could make an unlimited profit. At some point you hit saturation and it costs more than it makes you.
Meanwhile the little guy needs it more because they're unknown, i.e. their baseline is further from the point of saturation so they have a higher cost/benefit ratio. If nobody advertises then people keep buying from the incumbent because they don't know of any alternatives.
The biggest problem with advertising isn't big vs. little, it's that it's a signaling war. If Coke spends a dollar and Pepsi doesn't, Pepsi loses $2 in sales. But if they both spend a dollar then they've each burned a dollar only to both stay where they started.
What would really help is to have some industry of trustworthy third parties whose job it is to tell you what to buy, but nobody has ever really cracked it, because the buyers don't want to pay for it and the sellers only want to pay if it will influence the results.
Advertising indeed seems to give an edge to newcomers over the incumbents, but those same "little guys" would need to advertise less if everyone's attention wasn't already saturated by everyone else's ads. Everyone is still wasting money; new players just waste less.
Pull advertising isn't really the same kind of advertising as the predominant push kind, and it's the latter that's considered a problem. Let people decide where and when they want to be advertised to on their own. Let them visit exhibitions, trade shows, buy or browse product catalogs and shopper's magazines.
An article or review about a product written by an independent journalist that wasn't bribed is not an advert. Whether it appears in a printed publication or an online equivalent is immaterial.
But we don't want to spend our time researching possible new products. Empirically, we just keep buying the same thing until disturbed by some outside force.
What's the problem then? If our choices weren't at least little bit sticky, marketers would have us running around like headless chickens. Meanwhile, the "disturbing force" often is our own dissatisfaction, our search for novelty, and our changing needs. Things wouldn't stagnate.
If your product is good, it can break into markets by word of mouth. You ignore the fact that incumbents can easily pay for advertising out of economic rents they collect, and do.
Ads can be disruptive, but they are also frequently deceptive and simplistic, not to mention distracting. I loathe the industry with a white-hot passion.
> They allow new businesses to break into markets owned by old dominant suppliers.
Tesla broke into the automotive market - one of the most resistant markets to new entries - without doing any advertising. (Tesla does do marketing but it doesn't do advertising).
Genuinely new and innovative products and services generate their own buzz. They don't need to advertise. Meanwhile the old dominant suppliers often run advertising campaigns that pretend that their new product offering is revolutionary or innovative when it's nearly always just a gimmick or some old product that's been 'futured' up.
Meanwhile, there are resources available for people who are stuck in areas of high visual pollution, which require only a small investment in tools and mindfulness of personal safety.
one reason I love living in Asia the shear amount of advertising is far more interesting to walk around than say Irving California which is basically Speilberg-esch E.T. suburbia.
Question: can you read the advertising (i.e. read the native language)? Because for me at least, chinese & japanese advertising can look 'picturesque' but I think I would feel differently if I could actually read the banal messages that are undoubtedly being pushed.
My guess: no obvious immediate hazard + not enough public outrage + lots of money flowing through = countries want to tax it to capture some of that money.
Banning ads would be nice, but that's already old thinking.
The growth of the influencer model, advertorials/newsvertising, and individual personality as brand experience means that even if all public ads were banned, brands would just be paying thousands of micro-influencers for IRL mentions, tracked silently through the mic on your phone.
When you take the influencer thing to it's logical conclusion (everyone is a brand ambassador) then it becomes real murky real quick about what's an ad and what's just a person's opinion.
That's just a reason to also ban "influencing". Few other ways of advertising damage the basic fabric of society - interpersonal trust - as badly as influencers.
I can't wait for the day when we finally get rid of these coordinated assaults on our senses, both online and in the real world. Things like Ublock Origin & SponsorBlock have opened my eyes to a world without adverts.
