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Comment by chefandy | Hacker News Reader

Ads range from a (necessary, in a capitalist society) nuisance to a scourge, and people justly put up increasingly thick boundaries to shield themselves from their influence. When waning cultural relevance or whatever dilutes that influence, you can more easily see the ads for what they are— often manipulative marketing tactics implemented through often genuinely beautiful art and design. Both aspects are fascinating to consider and the art can be quite enjoyable. Early modernist posters from Paris are beautiful. Watching collections of mid century television ads in the prelinger archives is fun, and tells us a lot about the ways we are influenced by modern ads speaking to current perspectives, fashions, and concerns.

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Capitalism would work 100% fine without ads because people naturally compare and contrast options when buying stuff.

All that's necessary is making it possible for people seeking out your type of product to find you. And for revolutionary products, there's word of mouth.

If anything I think capitalism would function better without ads, because I would argue that advertising overall results in less informed customers, especially the modern lifestyle/brand type of advertising that's clearly quite effective at manipulating people.

If there were no ads, how would people know that products existed? Would they just see the products on store shelves? What about services? Would labels be ads? Would how stores merchandise things be advertisements? Could businesses negotiate for specific product placement? How would you find out about stores? Would store signs be ads? How about really big ones? How about at the edge of their property along a road highway? Could the sign say what the store sold? If you were to start a product guide to help people find what they need, how could you possibly afford to buy enough products to be useful and up-to-date enough while slow crawl word of mouth got the business off the ground? Would asking people to tell their friends be an ad? If not, could you pay someone to spread the word about your product? Would traveling sales reps be ads? What if they wore head to toe logo gear? Could you just pay people to do that without selling things? Ads suck but I don’t see how a capitalist society could survive without them.

I think the definition would have to be an exchange of something of value for telling other people about a product. There are some companies that got off the ground with no paid advertising but I think they’re an exception. Generally people are not seeking out new products.

But the whole point of a capitalist society is that competitors that do things better/cheaper start taking customers so the capital moves to the best and most efficient system.

It’s an interesting question I guess (and slightly worrying that I can more easily imagine the end of the world than the end of advertising). Especially if we take it to the extreme and imagine sponsored listings also don’t exist. I guess incumbents would have a big advantage.

There are second order effects of ads that we’d need to consider. Facebook and Google wouldn’t exist as we know them. Maybe that means some of their research doesn’t happen?

If incumbents would be favored then it stands to reason that total advertising spend would be at least loosely proportional to market decentralization. Yet in America advertising spend has increased many orders of magnitude since the 50s, while the market has simultaneously become dramatically more centralized.

By contrast in parts of the world with relatively negligible advertising, markets tend to be heavily decentralized.

And I think this makes far more sense of you think about it. If you make a soft drink that is rated far higher than Coke in blind testings, or perhaps one that is near indistinguishable in flavor, but cheaper, you stand very little chance of competing successfully. There's a reason Coke spends billions per year in advertising, and it has nothing to do with reaching the three remaining people who are not aware Coke exists.

And yeah without advertising the "free" services on the internet wouldn't exist, replaced by a mixture of genuinely free services, and for-pay. This would IMO be a dramatically better state of affairs. Businesses whose actual customer is not the people using their product/service leads to such dystopic nonsense.

There's a similar question that crosses my mind occasionally: 'how would capitalism work if there were no brand names and no advertising, but only product reviews?'

Would it even be possible to safeguard the product reviews system from bribery? The current systems we use for product reviews obviously would be unsuitable.

At any rate, I commiserate about the role of branding and advertising today. It's as often noise as it is information.

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