Mildly Interesting

I'd support a ban on advertising in public spaces, but in digital spaces its a bit nonsense given it funds a lot of things people then dont need to pay for.

It's necessary for monopoly capitalism to induce demand. It's part of the planned economy.

Ok but what if invent a new product that nobody even knows how to use? Just hope people take the chance on random unknown thing. Where is the ad non ad line drawn?

Word of mouth works for someone with an already established customer base but I can't even imagine how I could have gotten my business going when I started a year ago without ads. That's how 99% of my customers found out about me. This is physical flyers though - I don't do online advertising except for maintaining a some kind of social media presence for my business.

Then we’d have a centrally-planned economy I guess. I don’t really see how a free market would work without advertising.

The problem is: Where does advertising start. Is mentioning a brand name somewhere already advertising? If I have a brand, call it GLURP, am I allowed to print GLURP on the product, on the box, on the instructions? Am I allowed to have a website called GLURP.com, and what would be allowed to be shown there? Can I open a shop and have a sign "GLURP" over the window? Can I really exhibit my products there?

Because all of this is advertising.

I think we can all agree that 99.99% at least of intruding ads on the net, billboards, TV, radio, whatever, are annoying and should go away. But any ruling trying to reign this in needs to set 100% clear and undisputable limits, because they will sacrifice their own kids to somehow skirt such a law. If you don't believe me, look at tax laws and how the rich don't pay taxes (despite frequent bouts of crying over the 37% they never pay).

The idea that advertising is a new invention is nonsense.

Yes, it had different forms but it was there.

Eg: What are the priests if not sales people and what are the Sunday bells if not calls to action, and what are the icons and statues if not aspirational advertising and fomo?

What are shop windows? What are branding marks?

Here is advertising in Ancient Rome

You'd put a lot of people out of work.

all business would fail.

Ideally, I'd love for it to work, but realistically it would devastate the current ecosystem if implemented naively.

Full stop.

This is where I stopped reading the article. It's such a red-flag.

What I was thinking up to that point, though, was

• some ads do inform about new products (Swiffer) at launch
• some ads actually demonstrate proper use of a product. None come to mind in the moment. But I have distinct memories of saying to myself, "oh! That's how that works!"
• ad breaks educate when a broadcaster is forced to include them. How would I know about the brown bear, the ptarmigan or the crack spider without Hinterland Who's Who? Body Break? "I'm just a bill, on Capitol Hill," anyone?

I'm sure we could brainstorm one or two more thin positives that ads provide, but those are weak enough already. Just, non-zero.