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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Commercial speech is unprotected speech.
To have your own jurisdiction, you need your own army.
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.
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
No.
Advertising is malign. We don’t stop to consider how the poor cotton farmer will harvest his cotton before abolishing slavery. We don’t stop to consider how the lead mine owner will make a profit before we swap to unleaded fuel. We don’t stop to consider how the poor government officials will afford their expensive lifestyle before we ban bribes. We prevent the harm. If anyone is benefitting from harming people, losing out on that benefit is the most lenient punishment they should ever hope for.
dont the yellow pages still exist?
Ads are okay if I am asking for them. So you have a dedicated ad search engine. Same rules as today for scams. The place that serves up scams will get that reputation. You could also make the specific engine liable to some degree if you want to curb it, but have to be careful not to create too high a barrier to entry or you will end up with a monopoly.
Im a big legalization of victimless crimes type of person but conversley I would like all advertisement for them banned outside of the other “adult” establishments. I would like them to require search engines and such to not index them and for non “adult” chatbots to know about or have any reference to them. It should be like a sorta grey web where to find the things you gotta sorta be in the things to begin with.
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.
Already had this discussion with people a dozen times.
Ban:
An individual or group providing money and/or goods and/or services to another individual or group to encourage or contract them to display, broadcast, or otherwise disseminate a piece of media or information to a third individual or group, in particular and/or in general, which the receiver/listener/viewer(s) has/have not specifically requested to receive.
Accepting, as an individual or as part of a group, money and/or goods and/or services by another individual or group to be encouraged or contracted to display, broadcast, or otherwise disseminate a piece of media or information to a third individual or group, in particular and/or in general, which the receiver/listener/viewer(s) has/have not specifically requested to receive.
Tying request of one piece of media to a noticeably disconnected/unrelated piece of media.
The ban on providing shall apply only to individuals or groups that have a gross revenue of greater than ~25x the annualized median wage for the smallest political jurisdiction which fully contains the territories they conduct business in. (For context, this would be ~$1,000,000 for a business in the US that conducts business across state lines)
A simple line is if the ad was paid for. So sign twirlers… paid for. Person walking down the street in a brand shirt they paid for is not an ad. Talking about a product… did you get paid, ad. And of course free or discounted services and such equals getting paid. No more free X if you review a place on yelp. And don’t worry about a new garbage service. People will talk even without getti g paid. And I think a carve out for an ad service that people can choose to view as needed. I don’t have ads in my tv viewing. So I intentionally surf trailers once in a while. Much better experience.
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.
everything we agree on is an ad would be prohibited
And that’s part of the issue; this assumes that we’ve somehow come to a consensus on what ‘ads’ are, or which are ‘bad’. I can get behind getting rid of obtrusive ads, such as pop-ups and video interruptions, but I also actually like billboard advertisements (As long as they are in locations that respect what’s around them, are legible from a distance (not wordy, I’m trying to drive!), and don’t have eye-searing lights). When I travel, billboards often bring us to some interesting locations we may not have thought of before.
Personally, I’d look at making policies restricting “obtrusive advertising”. I don’t mind the advertising, I mind the delivery.
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.
the post office has the cheapest targeted door-to-door advos you can get (which big corps/politicians abuse to absolutely spam the shit…which means people throw the shit away immediately. ironically the post office should charge more, or have some kind of local discount thing idk…)
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.
Step 1. Create a great marketing campaign to sell your idea!
Websites, newspapers, t.v., blogs, etc. pay their workers and expenses through ads. Are you suggesting all these become pay per use?
Yes. We are paying one way or another. Right now people choose based on free or not. So the “product” that can cram the most ads in and get people to buy ads wins. Not the best product. Make it cost real money, the quality of product will matter more than it does now. Clickbait is a perfect example. If they don’t get paid by the click, it would no longer be the best choice for them. It would end up being word of mouth that drives choice. So meaningful headlines and articles would drive sales again.
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?).
Your ISP would have to track everything you did on the internet, even more so than they do now. They’d have to coordinate with every web service you use to share billing information and what you did there to be able to invoice and distribute the money.
We’ll see this would be a use case for blockchain and such so that every participant in the flow gets it’s bit in exchange of the bytes they serve.
So that the isp doesn’t act like an even worse dpi point indeed.
I’m not saying it’s desirable. Just a fun thought experiment.
Just maybe this would be a way to finance content creators with more transparency and it would probably cut YouTube and the likes of it from their dominant position.
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.
This is why I want to set a basic minimum to allow for the actual small businesses to have a chance. I have an idea that any ban should apply only to individuals or groups that have a gross revenue of greater than ~25x the annualized median wage. (by state if operating entirely within a US state, by national median if operating across state lines, etc.) It would let small businesses get the word out at the start but once they are making (based on 2023 data) ~$1M/yr, (enough to have multiple employees and maintain a healthy profit margin) they are doing enough business that they should be established and no longer need exemption.
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
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
Also in Europe. I’ve heard about Grenoble (France), but there seem to be more now. Check out adfreecities.org.uk too. Most don’t seem to ban 100% of all ads, but close enough for me.
Maybe people who are used to this will become less tolerant of online ads, too.
Bermuda bans all physical advertising as well.
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
You’re defining advertisement different from what OP is talking about. There’s some good discussion on the other comments here about what that looks like as well as what is actually reasonable / feasible.
Banning ads seems like overkill. Going after deceptive practices aggressively and having strict regulation makes more sense IMHO.
We already have those, for example in the UK the ASA is a self regulatory body which prohibits deceptive advertising. They can also refer cases to statutory authorities such as Ofcom or Trading Standards.
YMMV in other jurisdictions.
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”.
