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.
Appealing idea obviously. But I think if everything else stayed the same, and suddenly ads were banned, we’d just see a lot of shady underhand tactics emerging.
There’s already lots of grey areas, influencers who are supposedly just talking about things they like but have some relationship with a brand they happen to promote… Is no one ever allowed to discuss a product? Can I promote Librewolf to people? But only as long as librewolf don’t give me any free swag? Do reviewers no longer get free copies of book or free screenings of movies? What if I contributed to a project, can I talk about my own work on my own channels?
The viral marketing stuff of the 90s was pretty weird. Dreadful though target online ads are, gangs of people going around the real world trying to influence word of mouth feels even more dystopian. Although, if big companies were encouraging staff to volunteer and get involved in community projects, (and giving them time off to do them) with the understanding that they’d “innocently mention” that they work at Nike, maybe that would be better than the current setup.
In the past, physical buildings often served as advertising. Lots of high end stores on shopping streets are mostly there as a physical advert for the brand, not because they particularly make a profit. Do we really want McDonald’s expanding into real estate to start making building reminiscent of the golden arches in visible locations? But maybe even if these alternatives would be intrusive in new and horrible ways, they are limited by being in the real world, and thus not infinitely scalable. And if city centres are revived by brands desperate for attention, and corporations has be involved in communities on an individual employee level, instead of just sticking a logo on something, maybe that would counterbalance the bad with some good.
Thanks for the thorough comment. I’d say your assessment is accurate. As it is, McDonald’s is a real estate company that also sells hamburgers. Corporations are not waiting for advertisement to be banned before they do those things. They’ve been doing them for a while. We should ban advertisement. The dystopia arrived a while ago.
I agree, as in many more cases it is better to regulate than it is to forbid. Companies and consumers will find a way.