[adangert]

Woah now, I would completely disagree, heroin does not make you happy, short term pleasure is not the same thing. New information which helps people is inherently a good thing, but can be obtained through other means than ads, i.e. word of mouth. The fact is that most ads are targeted badly and thus useless for most people, and the targeted ads that do help some are breaches of privacy, the better the ad the more information you must know about the person, which leads to all types of misuse of information.

Ads also give large companies leverage to destroy small companies. Basically if two entities are trying to compete, if one has more money, and a worse product, then they have the ability to out compete the smaller company specifically by spending more on advertisements.

The incentive model for advertisments is to take away as much privacy as possible from you (which we have seen in practice) and removes the effectiveness of the free market to function properly. Case in point, we should completely remove ads and only have new information from word of mouth or people who are willing to be paid for their time.

[nickelcitymario]

So your position is that without advertising, large companies would have no means to crush their competition?

1. They'd simply undercut their prices, as they do now.

2. Advertising can level the playing field when the smaller competitor understands the game they're playing. There are countless examples of now-major brands that started out as the underdog but put out really creative work. Truly creative work can radically outperform your average ad campaign, but they're risky. Which is why the major brands play it safe and can't produce the outstanding work.

As for the whole privacy/targeting thing, I'm not defending that one. I 100% agree that it's gone way too bloody far. I was perfectly happy with ads that were targeted based purely on the content being presented rather than the creepy profiles that a lot of media companies keep on all of us.