What will really happen is ads get more sinister and hidden. Product placements in movies will seem childish in comparison. Astro-turfing is already huge on Reddit, it will spread to all parts of media now, blurring the lines between genuine opinions and forced narrative.
Ads, marketing and branding are integral part of capitalism, it's never going to go away from consumption focused societies.
Like you said, it's already huge on reddit, and is almost certainty happening on HN, too.
HN is a niche demographic, but one that has an inordinate amount of wealth and technical sway. And since it's part of a startup incubator, there is no pretense of neutrality -- part of HN is openly flogging your brand.
I don't think that there is currently any evidence that adding consent to ad tracking will have a significant impact on "sinister and hidden" advertisement. ..and it does not seem intuitive to me either, as it's a completely new set of companies launching those dubious ad formats and strategies. It's not likely that Google will start crafting a hard to scale astro turfing API or something, just because their ad network got less profitable.
> Ads, marketing and branding are integral part of capitalism, it's never going to go away from consumption focused societies.
Just to highlight: "Capitalism" and "consumption focused societies" aren't equivalent. ..or at least not in any common definition of the term capitalism. Historic examples of self-determined non-capitalistic societal models were highly "consumption focused" as well.
I think that maybe post- or de-growth ideas are the only contemporary family of ideas I know that makes it a point not to be "consumption focused". But their ideas are, while interesting, still pretty loose on their edges.
> and it does not seem intuitive to me either, as it's a completely new set of companies launching those dubious ad formats and strategies
No it's really not. You can see it happening all the time on celebrity and "influencer" Twitter/Instagram/Tiktok. Most are pretty obvious, some are honest and use disclaimers that it's a paid ad but majority are just ads inside regular content without any disclaimers and such.
Ads, marketing and branding are integral part of capitalism, it's never going to go away from consumption focused societies.