People have clearly noticed the social and political issues with advertising for a very long time now. The issue is that it's hard to rally against one of the most lucrative businesses ever to exist that inherently has an extreme amount of messaging power to defend itself.
I think the issue is people really like watching TV and movies, and continuing to watch the content shows they are OK with all the ads. Never have people had more access to other content, or other ways of entertaining themselves.
I have no idea how people put up with the NFL in the US.
During the early days of sports streaming (sometimes still) you'd find a stream with a live feed of the stadium broadcast without the ads. During the commercial breaks you'd be able to watch what was on the megatron (camera panning crowd, in-stadium entertainment).
I would pay a massive premium to have access to that feed for every sports broadcast. Gabe Newell said it best about piracy offering the best experience.
It's also worth noting that advertising is nearly a necessity in an industrialized society. Production of goods has high capital upfront costs and marginal costs that become negligible at scale. You can't get that scale without advertising or a government-mandated monopoly. Or, at least, you can't get that scale quickly enough.
Trees (companies) compete for sunlight (purchases) and adverisements are their trunks.
They 'waste' enormous amount of energy on trunks not because longer trunks increase the amount of sunlight. They just lower the probability of being overshadowed by the others.
If somehow trees could agree on how high the trunk should be at most they could limit this waste.
Instead they literally grow trunks as long as the physical laws allow.
Instead of tons of in your face advertising everywhere you could have just one goverment manager directory of stuff and services. Where companies could register their products, services, pricing.
Of coure there would be law breakers and positive publications about brands paid for under the table but I think overt ban would lead to economy wasting much less money on advertising to outcompete itself.
I don't think such a drastic change will ever happen. Large percentage of our culture is created directly for the purposes of advertising. So advert free society would be different in so many ways. But I would bet it wouldn't be worse. And if it was, we could just lift the ban and see trunks grow back.
Instead they literally grow trunks as long as the physical laws allow.
In some cases this was literally true, as fast food franchises would keep raising their logo signs higher and higher until municipalities set height limits.
