If all advertising was banned, other institutions would set up to fill the vacuum. Imagine variations of Consumer Reports but that stretch across all sorts of industries.
Essentially, to get the word out about your organization or product (whether for-profit or non-profit), you'd have to convince someone with an audience to feature you *without paying them to do it*. In other words, your organization or product or service has to be genuinely interesting on its own.
And, since nobody else is allowed to pay for people's attention, you aren't competing with budgets, you are competing with other ideas. Imho this makes for a much more interesting information landscape.
You sound like someone who has never had to run an event, concert, protest, market a new product, or build reputation on an existing one. Your solution — rely on influencers who only review — is unscalable across industries, price points, and ultimately eye balls.
I have taken one project to $3 billion and another to $700 million, and along the way we have run numerous events, marketed numerous products, and built many reputations. Many of the most successful products (including one that hit 2 million MAU) didn't use any form of paid promotion at all!
So, I do happen to have relevant experience. I haven't run a concert or a protest, but I've done the rest of the things you mentioned, some of which at considerable scale.
That’s impressive. Given that experience, how do you expect people to learn of products and events without any paid promotion in a scalable way? Here n=all businesses.
You continue to beg the question. "Without advertizing, companies would not be able to scale" is not a weakness of the push to ban advertizing - it is a virtue. The people advocating against advertizing _actively want_ businesses to have a smaller maximal size.
I have never attended an event, concert, protest, or volunteered my time based on ads. I have based on community event calendars, upcoming event calendars that while they may have taken money for placement (which they should have been required to disclose but probably didn't) had plenty of free listings. The main time I've used ads for 'things to do' is on vacation and have found the ad promoted stuff generally not a useful indicator and had just as good of luck with the service we randomly found on our own (thinking things like sailing/snorkeling excursions in Hawaii, Costa Rica).
Not everything has to scale, and we should be comfortable with some ideas just being bad and us not doing them.
We got here because of scaling. We can now efficiently tap into the mental space of billions of humans at the same time. And that’s not just a problem, that’s THE problem.
Meaning that “this doesn’t scale!” isn’t a side effect. It’s the main effect, it’s the solution.
"And, since nobody else is allowed to pay for people's attention, you aren't competing with budgets, you are competing with other ideas. Imho this makes for a much more interesting information landscape."
Sounds nice in theory.
"You want to like us on facebook and get a perk for free on your app? (No money involved)."
"Hey you maybe want a job? We will give one to those who spread the word most about us"
Devil is in the details. And humans have a lot of details.
Otherwise I am all for starting to ban of advertisement, what is possible.
The law has pretty firm definitions for things like "in kind payments" and "consideration" - because these sorts of sneaky ways of rewarding people are also relevant to bribes!
So we aren't treading into new uncharted territory where the details need to be figured out - humans have been playing this game for centuries and the law already has effective tools for navigating the tricky parts.
And it is not really working well in my perception, when it is standard procedure for politicians to land high paying (useless) jobs in the industry they formerly regulated, after some grace period.
Or get payed a lot for being a public speaker. Where no one cares about the speech.
> convince someone with an audience to feature you without paying them to do it.
It takes time and effort to feature a product, how could they make a living?
I can imagine 4 different possible outcomes:
- People just find new loophole and behave exactly as before
- Large media company only features products from their friends and families. Monopoly.
- Only the government and a few selected individuals get the incentive. They gain from controlling the information.
- Only local businesses can survive.
They are very different outcome. You can't just ban one undesirable behaviour and hope for the best. You need to focus on what outcome you desire and how each and every side effects.
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While we are banning monetary gain for ad, can we stop political lobbying too?
> It takes time and effort to feature a product, how could they make a living?
That's exactly the point. People shouldn't be making a living promoting other people's products. If they like something and want to promote it, for no compensation, then they should.
Imagine someone with a home improvement YouTube channel. They really, genuinely like certain brands for the tools that they use. So those tools will be visible in the videos, and the person making the videos is free to tell viewers how much they like those brands.
It’s a ban on advertising, not a ban on marketing budgets. You could still have a Malborough F1 company to make your brand inadvertently visible in F1, and a Malborough Acting company to make actresses smoke in public in defiance to bad males who want to tell them what to do (both are true stories).
If advertising is blocked, the exact same amount of dollars will be spent perverting every public speech.
This sounds like a Utopian idea that in practice would result in a lot of self-dealing and outright fraud on the part of the influencers you’re hypothecating. Hard pass.
All you’ve done here is shifted how the money is spent. The companies with deep pockets will spend extra on getting into that reviewer’s queue. See: lobbying.
Essentially, to get the word out about your organization or product (whether for-profit or non-profit), you'd have to convince someone with an audience to feature you *without paying them to do it*. In other words, your organization or product or service has to be genuinely interesting on its own.
And, since nobody else is allowed to pay for people's attention, you aren't competing with budgets, you are competing with other ideas. Imho this makes for a much more interesting information landscape.