As an individual, I'd welcome no advertisements everywhere. I think ads were abused long enough. It's just a leech on the human life.
Ads should just be banned anywhere in general.
They concentrate power to those who already have it, because you can make more ads if you have more money. The local burger joint cannot compete against macdonals on advertising, the local soda against coca cola.
It's ugly, eat attention, and interrupt.
It creates business models with terrible incentives, which leads to censorship in medias, quantity over quality, attention driven content, etc.
It encourages mass surveillance, and is used to influence society in the worse ways, making it dangerous to democracy.
Finally, if you remove ads, suddenly you get a much better filter for things: if people don't think it's worth even a little bit of money, let it die. It was not worth it.
Besides, even if you pay, you still see ads. You see submarine articles in paid newspaper, ads before your movies in the theater, ads in your bus ride...
Can you imagine, all this ads money, now free to be invested in something else?
I don’t think so. I think business wants us to feel that way, while the average person would choose to not hear/watch/see ads given the choice. I’m not necessarily against advertising, and regardless it’s a fact that advertising drives our economy and as a whole we generally don’t know how to create and conduct business without advertising. But I am against the notion that not wanting ads is a radical stance. I think we do need to prevent that notion from being normalized. Business doesn’t get to expect me to watch ads or make me feel guilty or like a freak for not wanting them. They have to work for it.
I say this as someone who has run a business and had to do advertising, and as someone who has never worked for a company or organization that doesn’t advertise.
Is it really though? I could believe that advertising does incentivize people to buy things that they otherwise might not. But OTOH, if there were no advertising, people would still spend money, just differently. It's not as though people are going to start lighting money on fire in the absence of advertising.
I agree people would still spend money in a world without ads, but we don’t currently have that world, right?
Other industries have it but it isn’t attention whoring trash, it’s more subtle. The free coffee at a conference, the rep dropping by to say hello. The brand name on the pens.
The strong views against advertising are a very logical reaction to the obnoxious methods used.
Isn't ads exactly the opposite. A big company could preserve its brand even without ads, while a small company can't build a brand without ads.
But I completely agree on removing wall ads. Its ugly.
Plenty of businesses would die without ads, they would be naturally selected out of people lives because without the brain washing, they are just not that important enough.
Well, you at least levelled one of the playing fields (while also removing a huge eyesore, which I really like!). I think the business deals in the background play a very large role too, if not bigger than the advertisements themselves. By business deals I mean that many restaurants exclusively serve the coke or pepsi family of drinks. This won't change if we remove the ads, only strengthen, and the larger players have a bigger weight, so the field is still very tilted.
That plenty of businesses would die without ads, I completely agree. There's an entire business model of running a bunch of ads, selling a bunch of crap, then disappearing. I would say good riddance to these.
But most businesses are not niche, that's why it's called a niche.
People sell food, clothes, accommodations, services.
You can't fight wall-mart on general food or nike on shoes, or any big player on phones.
If you create a new tech product, your only chance is to go reddit, HN, etc, like the pine phone. Because you can't advertise it like apple with the iphone.
You can't buy product placement in movies and video games, you can't be at every bus stop.
So sure, if you sell biodegradable bamboo socks, your ads can do something.
But that's not 99% of what are sold in the world.
What is really sold is transparent to people, because they are so used to it. They don't realize they have maybe 3 choices of providers because all those brands belong to the same big super company. And each of them have their own dedicated marketing department.
1. People have mostly fixed amounts of money for these products. So the role of ads is to influence which brands/products people spend their money on. 10-20% of the cost of coke/pepsi cans is just the cost of ads that are used to influence you buy one of two almost identical products.
2. Ads total waste of society's productive power as ad spend has little correlation with the actual quality of the product. It is not helping you find the "best" product, only make products attractive to you.
I think this is an important point. If coke and pepsi were not allowed to advertise, they could only compete on price and quality.
This is clearly a win for consumers. For coke and pepsi, maybe a small to moderate loss of revenue? But then their costs would definitely go down (no advertising spend), so it wouldn't necessarily be a net loss even for them.
They can (and do) also compete on exclusive deals with places who sell soda. I'd wager it's more important than competing on ads, because what are people gonna do at a pepsi or coke exclusive place, not drink soda?
I'm sorry but the free market idea that's lurking in the argument is naive, when contrasted to our current (and past, and projected future) reality.
City life has undoubtedly taken a tole on my mental and physical health in the form of noise and light pollution combined with having zero control over it.
I agree with this one. Those flashy things really do cover up the ugly reality, in more ways than one, but they literally do too. But people need incentive to get things done. Broken that are covered up are not gonna get fixed, but if they are one the surface, they might.
Cyberpunk, as much as I love it, I'd treat it like other horror stories. Leave it in the fantasy world.
I think banning outdoor advertisements is a great idea, though, because people don't opt in to seeing billboards.