The idea feels like sci-fi because you’re so used to it, imagining ads gone feels like asking to outlaw gravity. But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence. Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.
The traditional argument pro-advertising—that it provides consumers with necessary information—hasn’t been valid for decades.
I’ve had adblockers on my browsers for years and pay for ad-free streaming. I easily went over a decade without seeing an ad on a screen in my own home. But when I’d go to a restaurant that had TVs (or to my mom’s house where she’d run the TV constantly) I’d marvel at how unwatchable it was. Just a constant interruption.
My wife has a friend who produced a TV series for Tubi and so we signed up to check it out and, wow. I had to tap out of watching it because of the ads. Just completely obnoxious and loud.
#YES, PLEASE.
I have been fighting advertising in my own way since the early 2000s:
- I abandoned broadcast radio in the mid-1990s. I can’t recall the last time I turned on a car radio.
- I abandoned broadcast TV in 2001
- I jumped on board with Adblock the moment it was released for Phoenix (now Firefox) back in 2004
- The lone streaming service I actually subscribe to is the cheapest non-advertising tier available
- Torrenting covers many of the remaining gaps
- Even my Internet Radio stations are chosen primarily through lack of advertising.
It’s gotten to the point where stumbling across an ad is the mental equivalent to nails on a chalkboard.
As I sat down this morning to enjoy my warm and full-flavored Folger’s coffee, it got me thinking: traditional advertising might disappear, but something sneakier would inevitably fill the void: product placement.
Then you can ban paid product placement.
Exactly—it’s tricky because where do you draw the line? If someone genuinely prefers the smooth glide of their Pilot G2 pen, or casually mentions how much they enjoyed unwinding with a chilled bottle of Topo Chico last night, is that just organic conversation or subtle marketing? Makes it pretty tough to enforce without losing authentic chatter entirely.
It seems really easy. You ban companies from paying for product placement.
If someone talks about it organically they can.
There’s no grey area there.
“Online communities” are great, but how do you stop them from being infiltrated by corporate astroturfers within five minutes of creation? Doesn’t every major brand have a low-overhead keyboard farm posting social media and forum comments to make them look good?
Regulate and ban astroturfing campaigns. When corporations are caught doing so, have the penalties be similar to illegal dumping and include jail time for executives.
The thing is I don’t think I would mind advertising if it wasn’t shoved down my throat 24/7. The fact I can’t read a webpage without ads blocking everything, I can’t watch TV without more than half of the show’s runtime being ads in and out of segments, I can’t even step outside without seeing the billboard or another 5 ads shoved in my mailbox!
I get 15 some-odd emails a day from different companies trying to get me to buy things. I block them and they pop up with a different email address. I can’t even open my email without ads popping up masquerading as actual messages (Gmail). Don’t get me started on the entire Google app thing.
I can’t open an online map without getting SPONSERED listings. And places I use the app to order from try to advertise me their own food WHILE I’M ORDERING. Panda Express started asking me if I want a subscription to Starz or whatever.
NO. NO. NO.
I’m exhausted. I want to go to a store without being immediately inundated with ads or sellers. “Buy this!” NO. LEAVE ME ALONE.
I’m overwhelmed. I’m overstimulated. I’m done. I don’t care how “quirky” or “flashy” or “hip” your ads are. I refuse to buy anything I see ads for now. It’s too much. Shut up.
TL;DR: we need controls and limits to who, what, where, and how things are advertised. It should be an enforcable crime to have ads louder than a certain decibel for one. But it’s not enforced and fines aren’t more than a drop in the bucket. I doubt I’ll see it in ny lifetime.
Let’s ban all persuasive advertising! No reason not to let people make a list of features or something, like a notification, but that’s it.
Just making billboards ads illegal. It would make every city and the places in-between instantly better
We have this in Maine and it’s wonderful. Any time I drive through another state, the gross billboards are such a jolting sight (and blight).
I’ve been saying that for a long time about MI, were a tourist state for its natural beauty but it’s ruined by all the billboards fucking up our views.
We don’t have billboards here on O’ahu and it’s great. When I went to visit my family on the continental US (Boston and Florida), it was very annoying and distracting to see them everywhere.
but where’s the line between giant TVs on buildings and billboards?
The way the Maine law works, you are only allowed to have billboard-like signage (whether digital or old school) if it’s on the premises of the business. No off-premise billboards or screens are allowed. And digital signage must not be too bright or distracting for drivers.
Even with an adblock and the best privacy controls available, you cannot escape the effects of advertising. Article headlines will still be clickbait. Online recipes will still have long, unnecessary stories at the start. Companies will still want your email for trivial things so they can spam you. There are a hundred ways that advertising affects culture, and it’s not something that can change based on individual effort.
You also can’t escape the society affected by advertising. And it would be reasonable to assume that advertising not just increases consumerism, leading to pollution and worse climate change and genocide, but also must have an effect on the mind.
I would assume that people conditioned with advertising are less able to make rational decisions for e.g. voting. Advertising might have similar adverse effects on developing brains to lead in drinking water. But I doubt there is much academic research on this.
Another thing I always thought about this is how beautiful our cities and world could look if there was no advertising everywhere.
PS: Really good article. There is a sci-fi movie “Branded (2012)” which dramatizes this idea.
Online recipes will still have long, unnecessary stories at the start.
This is less because of that and more copyright. You can’t copyright a recipe as such, so the framing and layout and bullshit narrative are there to fix that.
You don’t need a very long blurb for that. A short paragraph would do fine. Tons of cookbooks have figured this out.
You have a long blog post because Google’s SEO favors that, and that’s tied into advertising.
You have a long blog post because Google’s SEO favors that, and that’s tied into advertising.
So in your hypothetical advertising free world we also don’t have search engines, at all? Or at least search engine results specifically don’t favor long blog posts?
SEO as we know it is a hugely marketing driven thing. The recipe blog does it because they want to bring eyeballs from Google search results, which gives them advertising revenue. Google optimizes their rules for SEO to likewise bring in Google AdSense money.
Search engines would exist, but the incentives are all different.
Right, but the food blog is still going to end up with an incentive for people to see it, so they’re still going to SEO because they can’t get subs/patrons/whatever they get income from from people who don’t know they exist. So, the implication is that search engines would preference a different style of food blog in the absence of advertising?
I mean, if you want my radical answer, it’s that people would write food blogs because they like giving out recipes in a mutual aid society. They don’t care about SEO, because it’s just a bother. Traffic will come to them organically or it won’t.
The hypothetical was a world without advertising, not a world without capitalism. You could make a food blog for the love of it without caring if anyone reads it or not now, but you likely wouldn’t bother with SEO if you did for the same reason.
OTA tv would no longer be possible, nor radio AM or FM.
Newspapers (what is left of them) would no longer be possible, neither wouild magazines.
A good deal of the internet is supported by ads too.
If you are willing to give up everything that is supported by ads, I suppose it could work.either governments and/or individuals would need to support them, it’s hardly impossible
Lol.
You are aware that newspapers and magazines currently exist that are entirely behind paywalls right?
Both private subscriptions exist, as does government funding.
It is entirely possible to exist in a world that both has the BBC and has The Guardian…
You can call the cover price on a physical newspaper or magazine a paywall but it’s a bit odd…
It’s not a bad point, and also highlights how we’re simultaneously spoiled for “free” platforms, while we’re surveilled for content and metrics, and bombarded by general and targeted advertising.
It’s like, imagine a world where there was a water fountain at the corner of every street, every parking lot, and every bus stop. How convenient that would be! But every time you walked near one they would squawk out a little ad.
Sure without the ads, you wouldn’t have the water fountains. But given the choice, I’d rather put up with the inconvenience of having to carry a water bottle when I’m out for a long time.
To me the choice seems obvious. Maybe to some people the ads don’t feel like such a intrusion, though?
There is no mechanism by which OTA television can surveil you.
I was listing out the costs of advertising broadly (that’s a big one for me), but not every cost applies to every instance. I think my point works just as well without that proviso, though.
I’m curious, where do you stand on the worth it / not worth it question?
I sometimes wonder about this. If a company can’t stay afloat without being paid for by advertisements, if their product can’t make enough money on its own to keep the company working, then is that product that important?
I appreciate it doesn’t work that way.
I just think if taxes could pay for water, gas, electric, healthcare, roads and infrastructure etc, then maybe we dont really need a fridge that can make a shopping list for us whilst i play doom on the screen.
Maybe we dont need slap chops and shakeweights.
Maybe we dont need all the crap out there that just isnt important.
Does my phone really need a folding screen or web access? Do we really need social media? Or youtube? In some cases, maybe, yes. But in the majority? No. I dont think we do.
Large corporate owned would be impossible. What you would see are more locally small businesses that get more customers. However things would be more expensive overall at a glance. But I bet we would see general living go up for all.
Well yeah, less money leaving local economies.
They’re getting way more money from stealing and selling data than ads anyway and really, TV and Radio only need to exist over the air for emergency or government stations so no income is needed. We shut off 3G, freeing up those radio and TV bands would be no problem.
I don’t pay for cable.
I get 117 over the air television stations In Chicago, I could get more with a better antenna.
They receive ZERO data about me or my watching habits, no way to steal it.
Lets try it and see what happens. No advertising seems like a reasonable response to advertising everywhere all the time.
I would argue that what this article is advocating for isn’t a definitive end to advertisement per se. Truthfully that would be impossible.
What we truly need are iron clad privacy laws that impose unbreakable regulations with destructive fines when violated by companies and organizations.
Adding “destructive fines” to my list
“We need a large group of ideologically committed bureaucrats willing to impose policy in the face of a defiant, intractable established opposition” is simultaneously true and not terribly helpful, unless you can show where these people are coming from.
Like, we’ve seen instances of this happen before. Elon’s DOGE is a great current example of a group of ideologically dedicated barn burners. The OG FBI was another great example of a department effectively founded to militantly oppose a well-financed and popular opposition. FDR’s court appointees (and his arm-twisting with the threat to further pack the courts) could be considered another.
But who in the modern political system wants to go head-to-head with multinational corporations (other than the Trump Tariff goons, I guess)? Dems are Pro-Business. Republicans are Pro-Fascist Business. There is no leadership, outside of a handful of die-hards like AOC and Bernie - who could conceivably be both willing and able to execute on these kinds of reforms.
I wish there was. But this is just pie-in-the-sky dreaming until you can find a municipal or state government with the kind of people engaged enough to rally for it and seek promotion to the federal level on this kind of platform.
I see advertising as a necessary evil. It helps small businesses take off and stay afloat (especially when alternatives for being funded aren’t viable for them), but at the same time it basically promotes corporate greed by shoving ads down our throats.
Abolishing advertising entirely would be improbable. I just want it to be toned down to the point where we’re all comfortable with it. Too much of a good thing inevitably becomes a bad thing. But too little of a good thing is also a bad thing. So things should be taken in moderation. In the case of advertising, the first statement applies; there’s way too much of it, it’s really in-your-face and disruptive, and we’re all getting sick of it.
Ads are an odd concept—it’s someone paying money to toot their own horn, which most of the civilized world looks down upon. In fact, the best way to sell me your product is to have the humility to tell me its downsides or give me a nuanced explanation of when to buy your product vs. a competitor. Otherwise, it’s always much better to let someone else sing your praises. I do find documentation, videos, and other factual information about a product to be the best possible sales pitch—give me an accurate picture of it, and if it’s really any good, I might just buy it. If I think you’re trying to bullshit me, I’ll assume your product has to be shit, or otherwise you’d just tell me the facts.
All you said might be true. But still, ads work. So well even that we run millions of websites from their earnings. Don’t even start on shows and sports. It’s insane.
Ha, and that’s why they exist despite what an otherwise terrible idea they are. 😂
How exactly do you define advertising? An overly broad definition would forbid, for example, a dentist from putting a sign in front of their office saying they’re a dentist.
Paying somone else to advertise for you. You yourself holding up a sign promoting yourself is fine, paying someone else to hold up a sign for you is illegal.
People talk about tech giants, but Facebook and Google are actually advertising giants. They pour much more money into their advertising than they do into r&d.
Many brands have a cost structure where, for each product sold, more money goes to advertising than to the person who actually made the product. Sometimes 2 or 3 times more. That’s where the battle for attention is taking us, a place where attention from customers is worth much more than the effort of the worker.
None of this is inevitable, advertising should be heavily taxed and regulated.
