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What If We Made Advertising Illegal? (simone.org)

submitted 1 day ago by sundrei@lemmy.sdf.org to c/mildlyinteresting@lemmy.world

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The idea feels like sci-fi because you're so used to it, imagining ads gone feels like asking to outlaw gravity. But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence. Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.

The traditional argument pro-advertising—that it provides consumers with necessary information—hasn't been valid for decades.

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[–] MouldyCat@feddit.uk 2 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

As far as I can tell, they didn't stop it - outdoor advertising is still banned there. It was hard finding recent online information about it though. The most recent references I found were a two-year-old discussion on Hacker News and a 2022 article from the BBC which mentions São Paulo's ban and says that Grenoble in France has something similar.

[–] noughtnaut@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago

I'm grateful to you for digging those up.

[–] fermuch@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Thank you for the links. I've been there recently, and everything felt cold and gray. I could not really understand why, since all of Brazil feels so charming, green and vivid. Maybe your argument explains a part of it: since there is no advertising, there aren't many colors on the streets (it might've been my impression, tho').

[–] MouldyCat@feddit.uk 1 points 5 minutes ago

that's interesting that you mention that - never been there myself or anything, but I did come across reports that the city authorities had relaxed rules on large murals to make up for the lack of advertising, and there's certainly a lot of pictures of some pretty impressive artworks!