Public media and TV in Europe, including the one with the largest budget on the entire planet - German, play and display ads even though are sponsored from compulsory per-household fees.

The BBC often congratulates itself on not showing ads. Instead, every radio show is 50% 'trailers' for other BBC things which you'll hear half a dozen times by the end of a workday.

Swedish public service TV is the same. Guess all the 1-hour shows are down to 27 minutes of content or so, leaving huge gaps needing to be filled with some .. air.

That seems to be exactly how SiriusXM is set up in the States. I hear about their other shoes all the time.

Wow, higher than bbc.

What's more annoying is adverts are a mere 7% of income, yet make it unwatchable.

So lucky in the UK.

Is this actually a market inefficiency? Maybe this is an opportunity to discover how humanity can still make information known about products and services without having to make our entire cultures about consumption.

I mean, advertising is about information sharing in a way. Can it be more efficient without clobbering art and media?

Ads are less about "information sharing" and more about manipulation though.

If I think about "information sharing", I'd imagine that the information is the thing of value to be shared and the goal is to enable the recipient to perform their own decisions with and increased base of background information.

However, ads work the other way around: You start with certainly outcomes that you would potential customers arrive at in their decisions and then think which information you can deliver to them to reach that outcome.

Good points. So what does an ad that doesn't have a behavioral component look like, and can they be presented in a different way? And could we still make that effective? Or is it a class of ad that is ethical vs not?

I know I'm way off in the weeds here, just brainstorming.

"Company X sells a product Y which is meant to solve the problem Z, and does so through features A, B and C."

That's it. The ad just informed consumers about existence of a particular company and product, made it clear what the product is for, and listed its important qualities (especially differentiating from other similar products).

That's what you do when you actually care to inform, and not manipulate, customers. Since pretty much no ads are like this, I call bullshit when someone says advertising is important because it informs people.

Well, I don't think it would be an ad anymore, because if the goal is to inform a consumer, the goal can't be to promote a particular product/brand/company.

So maybe something like independently ran price comparison sites would work?