[aml183]

I don't understand this POV at all. Advertising provides a fair playing field for up-and-coming businesses. If startups could not advertise, how would people find out about it? If I want to start an eCommerce brand, people won't suddenly show up on my website. If I open a new club in a city, people don't just suddenly show up.

Without advertising, the world would be filled with large companies with no incentive to innovate because it would be impossible to discover their competitors.

[zeruch]

"Without advertising, the world would be filled with large companies with no incentive to innovate because it would be impossible to discover their competitors."

There is nothing in that sentence that makes sense historically, and certainly doesn't now. Larger firms can leverage advertising usually better than small players just on budget terms, so it isn't just advertising itself, but how its deployed.

Adtech favors larger players that are platforms (e.g. Doubleclick) and just scrapes marketing dollars from everyone it can, and then benefits the platform itself if its product family has competing products (Google, Amazon, etc)

Advertising doesn't provide any fairness in a playing field. It's simply a parallel arena of competition with a more opaque set of operating rules.

[hedora]

Today's advertising industry systematically violates everyone's privacy with no practical opt-out, and hand the information to oppressive regimes.

Also, the middlemen extract tons of cash from the auction process, diverting it away from sites that people actually want to use, and spending it to cement in their mostly-hated monopolies.

[Teever]

The problem is that what we call advertising isn't what advertising actually is.

Advertising in the 21st century is about spying on people, whether or not they want it whether or not they will ever be your customer, and selling that information to other people if it's beneficial to your business.

That isn't advertising.

That's organized stalking.

[bediger4000]

Advertising is as near to lying as the advertisers can get. Also, advertisers end up corrupting ad-supported media: look at all the "payola" scandals in radio. Newspapers famously didn't run stories that upset major advertisers. Google has gone from being nearly miraculous to just serving ads, not to mention what SEO (which is nothing but optimizing advertising) has done to it.

[ok_dad]

I bet those innovators could come up with a solution that doesn’t involve eyesores placed on every surface imaginable, if traditional advertising were banned.

[CrzyLngPwd]

Advertising sponsors the addictive attention economy. It's poison.

[snypher]

>Without advertising, the world would be filled with large companies with no incentive to innovate because it would be impossible to discover their competitors.

And yet we have this world anyway.

[thfuran]

I do think the world would be better if most forms of advertising were strictly limited or banned, but advertisement absolutely doesn't require what is being called "advertisers" in this context.