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.
