There are lots of cultural opposition movements online, like against work exploitation, consumerism, car culture, surveillance, intellectual property, etc. I can find communities on lemmy for all those topics. But regarding a more general opposition to advertisements and marketing, other than the occasional person telling others to use adblockers online (what about ads in every day life?), I fail to see organized attempts to challenge advertisements. There is a lot that can be scrutinized. Ethical concerns such as manipulation, lack of consent and just the simple fact your attention is for sale. The effects range from damage to environment, to our mental health, to harming industries themselves, lowering product quality and maintaining monopolies.
Honestly, advertising is very dystopian. Online tracking being the obvious first example.
But that’s not all. How should I block physical ads in the city? Not only does it ruin the view, but roadside billboards surely caused at least one death by distracting a driver, and ads can get quite distasteful.
Also, it’s not just roadside - they’re plastered everywhere! Buildings, bus stops, right in the middle of the sidewalk. Some are classic paper, some are of the TV screen type. Some are quite small and inconspicuous, but a lot are huge enough to be seen from at least half a mile away.
Physical ads don’t finance anything. They’re just obnoxious. I don’t know how succeptible to ads other people are, but for me it takes an actually good offer to entice me - and usually that’s heard on radio or seen on TV (as far as ads go).
Chose your own dystopia. Where no ads exist and everything is pay per view/read/report/etc. Or the one we’re in.
The bigger problem with traffic deaths is that we developed a system of transportation that relies heavily on cars that are mostly driven by humans. Removing billboards is not going to improve on that that much. But underwear model billboard pileups are a thing. But so are those caused by drivers on their phones and my guess there are way more of those.
Tracking and selling of information has gotten out of hand, no doubt. It is political decisions or a lack thereof that got us here.
Btw everybody thinks they’re immune to advertising. And we’re not.
The unofficial wisdom of marketing is that half of any advertising budget is wasted. They just don’t know which half. So they continue. This whole thing boils down to the fiduciary responsibilities to provide as much value to shareholders again, the bane of capitalism. They cannot afford to check which half is wasted.
And just for some context here: personally I don’t mind billboard ads to be honest.
Ads being a replacement for paying applies to internet services (social media, news sites, etc. that you can use for free). When you have billboards on the side of the road, you still have to pay the road toll. When you see ads in public transport, you still have to pay the ticket. When ads are shown on a TV channel, you still have to pay the subscription.
Online ads, as insufferable as they are, are still more clearly justifiable from the end user’s point of view than traditional ones.
You could argue my take is too accepting of the current situation and I would agree with that. At the same time, I would argue yours is simplifying things quite a bit. Subscription TV channels came after free-to-air channels with commercials. This may depend on where you live in the world but most places have at least one local station or a selection of them broadcast through the air, not cable or satellite, and not subscription based. Financed through commercials or in some countries also through a license model (like in the UK). Cable/satellite/subscription channels are iterations on the model brought to you by capitalism. Ads in public transport can lower ticket prices. Billboards can help lower rental rates in buildings and their revenue adds to the tax intake of the community they’re in. If you think it already takes too long to get potholes fixed, it would take even longer without them. Not all roads are toll roads. I get it: you don’t like billboards. You’re going to get all these unintended side effects if they were banned tomorrow.
Online ads are insufferable. I’m running 3-4 plugins to avoid them. I’m also normally watching broadcast TV on DVR so I can skip through the commercial breaks. I bail on any subscription service that adds ads.
The problem online is the cause of the problem. It’s the simplicity with which data can be collected and the lack of regulation. It’s also generally still paying off a debt incurred when in the early days of www users got accustomed to getting everything ‘for free.’ Traditional media has lowered the price dramatically of its own offerings to get new eyeballs online while older streams of income still paid for most expenses, like the income from TV commercial revenue or sales of printed paper. And as these traditional sources of great rivers of money decreased over decades, the ones that replaced it were digital trickles in danger of drying out. That brought about a “militarization” of online ads, ever more targeted and annoying. This problem needs a multi-pronged approach including regulation of data collection and new financing models for media in general.