I want to get as far away from the ad economy and ad culture as possible. Since there’s a 0% chance the morons supporting it will ever learn from their mistakes, I’m starting to realize the only option going forward is to create new places where we aren’t stuck with the “tunnel vision of the stupids.”
It doesn’t have to be large, start small and work our way out. It also doesn’t have to be expensive. It shouldn’t be too difficult to enforce a ban on physical advertisements within the borders, but digital advertising is a whole 'nother ballgame.
Even for a small town, would it be possible to sue companies for running ads in it? Similar to how the same company will show different content on their web services depending on where the user connects from to adhere to local laws. It would be fine if they just blocked connections from where advertising is illegal, but it’s not okay for them to show ads to our residents.
Any insight into this besides useful idiots saying advertising is good or necessary would be greatly appreciated!
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.
Websites, newspapers, t.v., blogs, etc. pay their workers and expenses through ads. Are you suggesting all these become pay per use?
I mean, while that sounds like it makes things more expensive, I’m not entirely sure that it does, given that:
It doesn’t really make sense to run ads unless the average person watching the ad will ultimately buy enough that they wouldn’t otherwise from the company the ad is for that the extra profit exceeds the ad cost, thus still making watching ads have a cost that just isnt visible
Or, ads might be run to simply get people to switch what product in a category they buy without increasing the amount, in which case, they become a required cost to stay competitive, and because suppliers must now all pay that extra cost, the cost to buy products in that category must be increased, again making the ads cost the viewer in a non-visible way
Or, we could be seeing things like political ads that dont ask one to buy things, just support a politician or policy. However even here, the policies most likely to get ad spending are those most beneficial to people that already have money (since they’re the ones that can most easily afford to run ads) and in general, benefiting those people means giving them a bigger share of the economies wealth, which means the average person has a smaller share when the ads are effective, again costing the viewer in an roundabout way.
If people are going to end up paying for the use of these things in some way anyway, doing it directly seems more honest to me.
Clearly… imagine you have an allowance of say 100€ a month managed by ISPs and all of that would be spread across all used services based on usage. Internet services PAYU.
That would drive interesting changes in the landscape for sure.
And how retributions would be shared between the various layers and ecosystems.
Also would likely kill all new entrants and innovation. Plus some legit use cases for advertising (goodbye marketplace I guess?).
Step 1. Create a great marketing campaign to sell your idea!
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.
Great points, and it’s important we address this from a realistic perspective.
I don’t have all the answers, but I would start with the low-hanging fruit to avoid penalizing innocent people. Pretty much everything we can all agree on is an ad would be prohibited, you could think of it as “systemic advertising.” (ads in the middle of videos, billboards, banners). Would somebody wearing a branded shirt be considered advertising? Probably not. Would somebody standing on the side of the road twirling a sign for a business be advertising? Absolutely.
I don’t think there’s a “perfect” solution and some viral marketing is bound to get through. As with any crime, stopping it would depend on the resources available to the community.
I would consider a place where systemic advertising is illegal and penalties are enforced to be a success.
I think rather than address all advertising, it would be best and easiest to create a more specific “obnoxious advertising” category and put things in it as needed. Honestly I don’t really care if someone twirls a sign, but if that becomes the go to and there are twirlers on every block then I’d get sick of them really fast.
But you also have to allow for things folks might genuinely want to know. If a local restaurant has a grand opening and you don’t let them tell people, they at might have trouble getting foot traffic after they open. If I start up a competitor to a trash service, ads are likely the only way people are going to know my service is 15% cheaper.
I don’t like advertising, but I do acknowledge a certain amount is probably necessary.
This is how you do it. You create clear and direct laws that specify what isn’t okay. New Hampshire banned all billboards. I believe Vietnam recently banned all ads longer than 15 seconds online. These make it absolutely clear what is and isn’t okay, and leave no wiggle room for companies to try to circumvent the laws on technicalities.
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”.
Banning ads seems like overkill. Going after deceptive practices aggressively and having strict regulation makes more sense IMHO.
Some places already ban physical ads. There are better sources than these but this is what I found so far:
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
Bermuda bans all physical advertising as well.
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.
Do you know if clients ever hear of your business via other clients, like word of mouth advertising? Or is it primarily through targeted marketing?
Yeah, I always ask if it’s a household I haven’t dropped a flyer to yet. In these cases, the answer to “where’d you hear about me?” is almost always that they saw someone else asking about it on Facebook and someone recommended me in the comments. Interestingly, it’s never the original poster who ends up contacting me - it’s usually some third party just scrolling through the comments.
A few have gotten direct recommendations from previous customers, but that’s pretty rare overall. Most saw my flyer, and the rest mostly found me through local Facebook groups.
Edit: I don’t do targeted advertising though. Just physical flyers and I occasionally post pictures of my work to Facebook and Instagram.
That’s interesting to hear, I wouldn’t have assumed flyers work much. Honestly I can’t remember the last time I got a flyer that wasn’t from some huge corporation. It’d be a nice change of pace to get some local anything in the mailbox.
Now that I’ve said that, watch me get bombarded like the Dursley’s haha.
Yeah, I have no clue how effective it is compared to other advertising methods, but it’s worked well enough to keep me steadily employed.
I don’t really know what I’m doing here. I don’t have any self-employed friends or anyone to copy business practices from, so I’m just winging it - trying to build the kind of service I’d personally want to hire. My flyer is designed by me and it shows. It’s immediately obvious to anyone who sees it that this is just one guy working out of the back of a van, not some big corporation. Plenty of people have told me that’s the main reason they reached out.
Escape competition through authenticity
- Naval Ravikant
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 your cause.
edit: typos/ missing word
There is no way to do that.
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.
Sounds like bad news for the local newspaper.
Local newspapers are already closing en masse even with ads, and many of the ones left barely count as newspapers anymore. We need to solve this issue separately. Maybe start rolling out straight-up subsidies? That would open up local newspapers to government censorship, but that’s not necessarily worse than newspapers ruled by adspace buyers, and generally better than no local newspaper at all.
Maybe start rolling out straight-up subsidies? That would open up local newspapers to government censorship
The Corporation For Public Broadcasting (RIP) did a good job of helping NPR, PBS, etc stay impartial and relevant.
Impartial?
NPR hasn’t been impartial in my lifetime. See also the radio programs the US projected to the rest of the world (I forget the name of it) - essentially a propaganda arm of the government…
Government should have zero involvement with such stuff.
Maybe - i suppose one way around it is newspapers run by specific organisations or for specific topics. For instance, universities have their own free newspapers, there are newspapers in my city for artists and musicians to share news relevant to their craft and any gigs going on.
Or you coukd have a completely digital one run by volunteers who have an interest in journalism, websites, and are willing to pitch in a bit. Also they can charge fees for anyone who buys it.
Could ban ads but allow for “free space” for local businesses to put ad spots or for people to advertise their freelance services or make headhunting requests. Remember how people used to seek dates using newspaper spots? I guess thst’s obsolete now. But still.
Stop using ‘free services’ They’re neither free nor even cheap
The unfortunate reality is they cannot be avoided in some cases. There is not a paid alternative to Facebook, nor are there to a lot of f2p mobile games.
My grandma had a tablet about a decade ago, and I loaded it up with tons of paid $1-$3 casino games for her (it’s what she wanted) but a decade later, when going to reinstall them to a new tablet, all of them no longer exist on the play store and seemingly 100% of current games are either ad supported or require iap to refil your virtual currency.
She literally did what you asked and today she still has no options. What should my 86 year old grandma do in this case?
