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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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Should we allow the best of science to be used to manipulate people’s base desires? Or should we protect the average person from being taken advantage of?
Unless you are a sociopath the answer is clear. Advertising in its current form should be completely banned. Perhaps some form of non-comparative advertising could be allowed if it just stated simple facts without creating a psychological hook to subconsciously fuck with the consumer.
Who am I kidding though, give these fuckers even an inch and they will circumnavigate the globe. Ban all advertising.
I have existed totally ad free for a few years now. I use a whitelist DNS filter.
I want to live there. I can’t tell you how sick I am of ads. I’ve seen a lifetime of advertisements and I’m done.
I am kinda for it, but kinda against it because I like this 35% off coupon for weed in the bay area I get in the local ad magazine. I save so much fucking money with that coupon I love it
Lets try it and see what happens. No advertising seems like a reasonable response to advertising everywhere all the time.
I was on a car from ride sharing app recently, and there was a tablet in front of me playing ads continuously for the whole ride. Asked the driver to turn it off and he said, “I have to keep it on”. I know it’s not the requirement from the app, so honestly how dystopian is it?
The way things are going people can’t afford anything and will have ads blasting in front of them for discounts.
I wouldve left an awful review, 1 star, no tip. Thats such shit to do. Fuck that guy.
Yeah. I didn’t want to do immediately after the trip. But now I don’t see the option to do it from the history of trips.
Lol, almost no one tips as is right now.
this happened to me once and I gave them 1 star for forcing me to watch ads
I don’t get a lot of ads already, and I could honestly use more in terms of new games and movies coming out. Word of mouth doesn’t work great for obscure things either.
I refuse to watch all advertising.
I’m on board and have been for a long time. I am true believer of Bill Hicks’ opinion of marketing. I stopped watching broadcast/cable TV in the late 90’s because I couldn’t stand watching all the propaganda mixed in with the shows. Whenever I’m in a doctor’s office lobby or somewhere that has a TV on, it’s a bit of a shock to see all the commercial bullshit again.
Does wonders for you once it’s not occupying space in your brain.
lol you want advertisers to kill themselves. Bill and George Carlin are my favorite comedians. Haven’t been able to find anyone else who hits the spot. Rip.
Check out Josh Johnson. He is the next George Carlin in my mind. His social commentary comedy is 🔥.
Well no, I’d prefer they just find another line of work, but…. 🤷
“THE JOY OF NOT BEING SOLD ANYTHING”
Ultimately some ads will become illegal as legit advertisers (large corps), get pissed off at all the dick pill ads mixed in with their content.
Yes please. Blocking all advertising possible in my online presence did wonders for my sanity
I really hope ypu create an inspirational moving piece of art that could truly change the world only to discover the only way anyone can learn about it is word of mouth.
Not all ads are screaming for your attention to buy useless stuff.
Like you mentioned, if you create something high-quality, people will notice, and it’ll slowly gain recognition.
Over the course of centuries maybe
In fact, all quality works became famous much later.
Picasso’s works became famous in his time due to…advertising.
I’m anti-advertising, but this simply isn’t true. Customers don’t show up out of thin air. They don’t care. Anyone who’s built or created anything knows that feeling invisible is the rule, not the exception.
A lot of us here on Lemmy are part of the software industry. Have you ever tried to make money by building a great app and waiting for users to trickle in? It doesn’t work. You might as well declare bankruptcy before you start. Selling anything at all, let alone software, is like pulling teeth—and software is more often a luxury than a necessity, making it even harder.
(Granted, advertising has made the situation worse by training people to ignore any and all attempts to get their attention or communicate information.)
Approximately every successful software business has talented and hardworking salespeople behind the scenes. I’ve learned this the hard way: you need sales experts or you won’t sell a damn thing.
Maybe someday we can find a way to get by without ads. But let’s not pretend it’s as easy as “if you build it, they will come.”
maybe people need to stop the consumption madness
If you need to pay someone to talk about your product, it’s probably not as good as you think.
Lol, ok. Is that why we have had advertisements for thousands of years? Is it because products are worse or is it because someone had more stuff than they could sell by word of mouth?
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
I have nothing against pull advertising so that if I need something I go somewhere and pull some advertisement to get information about a product I need or want. Window shopping, going to church seem like that.
But shoving ads down my throat, no thanks.
My point is that the premise of the article is untrue - harking to a past that never was.
Don’t church bells shove advertising down your ears? How about if I open a competing church with louder bells? What if I open a donut shop and I ring bells to notify you that a fresh batch is ready?
“No more bells then”, cool.
How about mosques? No bells, just a guy screaming from a tall balcony. And another and another.
Even in communist Russia you had propaganda ads everywhere.
There are plenty of ways currently of blocking most ads out of online media anyway - though underhanded means like product placement etc still sip through.
The word “new” is a relative term. Humans evolved around 300,000 BCE, and ancient Rome (founded in 753 BCE) is pretty “new” by that metric. You’re not wrong that people found ways to “advertise” to each other throughout recorded history, but when it comes to prehistory (or as the article states, “99.9% of [humanity’s] existence”), life was very different. There can’t have been much to advertise before people developed tradable goods.
With that said, I’m intrigued by your comprehensive interpretation of “advertising.” Now I’m wondering about things that would not have been written down/recorded, like things a town crier might have been incentivized to add to their announcements.
“Hear ye, hear ye! A joust is to be held tomorrow evening in the royal courtyard, in the King’s honor. Sir and Lady Abbington announce the birth of their new son, to be baptized at the Lord’s church this Saturday. In celebration, Mavis the Fishmonger is offering a buy-one-get-one deal on all flounder! Come on down to the market square for fantastic deals on all your seafood goods - just look for the stall with the yellow awning. Get your catch of the day at Mavis’s!”
Haha! New is a relative term but really? 300k BCE? Reverting to pre organised society to avoid advertising?
Maybe we should go to pre human times, oh wait, walk through a forest and all you see is flowers advertising themselves to insects and birds advertising their singing abilities to each other.
So long as there’s competition for resources and attention plays a role in that distribution something will find a way to attract that attention.
I didn’t reach to find that era - it was referenced from the article, even the snippet at the top of this very page:
But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence.
Then you provided examples that occured within the most recent .1% sliver of humanity’s existence. Anything more recent than ~30,000 BCE is within that .1% time frame. Ergo, Ancient Rome doesn’t count.
flowers advertising themselves to insects and birds advertising their singing abilities to each other.
This is why it’s important to define terms before beginning debates. The advertising people are referencing here is the modern kind targeted at humans in order to manipulate them. To compare that to the symbiotic relationships between flowers and their pollinators, or to animals seeking a mate, (both scenarios that benefit all parties mutually) is a false equivalence.
Anyway, I tried to keep things light-hearted in that last post, to show that I’m not looking to attack anyone. I gave you credit for providing a novel viewpoint, in an effort to build conversation. But I’m getting the impression that you’re not arguing in good faith. If you’d like have a real discussion, cool, I’m in. But if you’re looking for an argument, I recommend you look elsewhere.
Sorry, it was not my intent to offend, I’m never looking for an argument - just look at my post history.
I got that you gave credit for what you found novel, and cracked a couple of jokes which were quite amusing, even though I wasn’t sure if you were actually considering them as possibilities or just having fun but even without that part it I would just have answered on the merits of your position without argument.
I don’t usually share laughs with people I argue with and I started my reply with a laugh to show that I’m sharing your willingness to argue in good faith. Maybe it came across mean spirited.
I’m really confused about what part of my reply was confrontational. I get that most of the conversation’s content is usually non verbal so perhaps you read it in a confrontational tone that was not intended - it was more ribbing or amused incredulousness in the spirited discussion intent and not at all “how dare you” or yelling.
Now on to the merits of the discussion:
Look, pulling Ancient Rome and churches and flowers and birds as an examples has a common thread, and that is to argue my conclusion in the last comment. That in any environment of competition for resources were attention plays a role in their distribution you’ll find advertising.
If the examples from recorded human history are to be cast aside as too soon then what about pre human examples from nature.
That was the crux.
Now you find the floral and animal examples as irrelevant because you make a claim that they are symbiotic so they benefit both parties - but I don’t find that convincing as there are not just two parties, or only those examples and also that was not the point.
The point is the competition for resources where attention plays a role in the distribution and how advertising emerges between competitors and the audience that will provide them with the desired resource or the means for it.
Whether it is to the benefit or the detriment of the receiver or an unsuccessful advertiser that is not very relevant. After all not all human advertising is detrimental, most is symbiotic. Buying this pack of chewing gums vs another or none, or this mouse trap or spending your time listening to one genre of music vs another doesn’t necessarily hurt you and might even benefit you in some way.
But a more apt comparison if you want the yard stick to be non beneficial advertising are the million ways that advertising in nature has ill intent - leading one of the parties to their demise: from Venus flowers, to angler fish, to camouflage, to fake mating calls, to fake food and hundreds of other examples.
But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence
Current forms yes for sure, as most of our current communication methods are new.
But advertising in general? That simply cannot be true. Yes the earliest examples we can find are from early human civilisations a fraction of the estimated age of humanity (however you want to define it, but let’s say Homo sapiens) but if you want to argue that…
The advertising people are referencing here is the modern kind targeted at humans in order to manipulate them.
…Modern brained humans were not trying to manipulate other humans in non mutually beneficial ways, either with whatever form of communication was available or with other traps when nature does it at its most basic forms and when I see little kids do it to each other from a very young age then the onus of the argument requires to either explain in detail how are humans not a part of a nature where this naturally emerges or what a society without advertising actually looks like.
It’s a bit late over here so let’s hope my rumbling is somewhat coherent.
I have hated few things in this world as much as advertising. It is one of the few industries I feel is beyond saving and produces nothing of value at all levels. I am of the opinion that advertising is like cancer, whenever it is allowed to get a foothold somewhere it will eventually kill the host. For-profit companies can not resist the easy money promised by advertising, so the only way to combat it is not have it to begin with.
I go out of my way to pay for the things I use with money and not attention if at all possible. I will nearly always favor buying from a company that does not get most of their revenue from advertising, even if it means I pay more for the product and it is a less capable product or service.
Another part of the problem I haven’t read in the comments is all the companies that rely on advertising to exist, especially media companies. Many newspapers, magazines, websites, TV channels etc would go bankrupt if they couldn’t earn money with advertising. There is a simple solution because we can ‘just pay them’ but I’m afraid we won’t. People hate advertising (someone commented “advertising is violence”, that really says it all), but still many of us choose to not get the subscription but use the ‘free’ option instead.
I’m not against banning all advertising, but I think working towards more peaceful advertising might be fruitful. Banning advertising of tabacco products and having disclaimers when financial and medical products show this can be done.
The future is not required to contain the business models of the past. More specially, I don’t believe “there are businesses that would fail” is a good argument. We need UBI or a better social safety net for the people in those businesses, but the businesses can simply fail and nothing will be lost.
That said, I think advertising can probably be reformed through a combination of removing the puffery exception, enhanced enforcement of existing truth in advertising laws, and increased civil liability for falsehoods at all layers: product (Kraft, Nestle, Tesla), production (“Mad men”), and propagation (networks, Hulu, YT)
Let those companies fail. A nee similar company will emerge from the ashes with a better business model that doesn’t rely on force fucking ads down your throat.
If the product can’t exist without advertisement does it deserve to?
If a product wouldn’t sell if it isn’t heavily marketed I’d agree it doesn’t need to exist. But if a product is paid for by advertising other products, that is a different story. Newspapers have had advertising for ages because of the high cost of running a newspaper, many tv-channels wouldn’t be able to exist on a subscription basis. Same goes for a lot of websites online. Also no more free porn (not legally at least). Advertising pays for a lot of things in our society. I’m not saying this is a good thing, but this system cannot be changed overnight.
I think anything that can’t exist without money from advertising either shouldn’t exist, or should be subsidized by taxes, not ads.
Tricky territory when you’re talking about journalism.
No doubt. And plenty of other things. Since the government doesn’t actually have the best interests of it’s people in mind. Bring on the AI overlords, since AI doesn’t have emotional reasons to hurt us for it’s own gain, maybe it will be better. Lol
