Advertising injects noise. Could government enrich society by limiting advertising?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Are you saying that the “razzle dazzle” is purposely created to distract us? Or that a noisy environement is simply an example of poorly run groups of people polluting our environment with razzle dazzle? If you think about it, the cost of the razzle has steadily declined over the years. That stuff they use to make billboards is a lot cheaper. No longer is there a finite amount of newspaper to cram the ads into. There’s also a lot more TV channels, and just in general a lot more spaces where ads can be crammed.

My hypothesis is that there isn’t a conspiracy, it’s just widespread marginal competence. What do you think?

22

What is an advertisement?

Is it advertising if I post political signs before an election, or put a bumper sticker on my car?

Is it advertising if I wear a Ralph Lauren shirt with a big polo pony on it? Is the MTV logo at the bottom of the TV an ad? Is talking about my favorite TV show at work advertising?

Is it advertising if I go on twitter to tell people how great the burger I had at Five Guys was? What about if Five Guys gave me free food to review it, or paid me directly?

How about before we start talking about taxing or curtailing advertising, we define exactly was ads are.

23

Advertising is an effective way to increase a company’s sales, reputation, and overall success. It is also the principal avenue to success for the printed and broadcast media that show those ads to the consumer. Newspapers, magazines and television networks would quickly collapse without advertising revenue.

Stop and think about the effects of restricting advertising.

24

i don’t think you have to worry about an advertising arms race, since companies do try to figure out if the advertising they are doing is cost effective. Mobile ad rates have been going down since advertisers are not getting a good return on them.
The exception is political ads - where you can’t really measure effectiveness until the election, when you stop advertising. Even then it sometimes doesn’t work. Jerry Brown way underspent Meg Whitman and kicked her ass anyway.

Without advertising, how do you propose new and innovative companies get themselves known? Word of mouth?
It has already been noted that media would crash without ads. You’d have to pay for content. How is that going to appeal to people? Some will be left, but not many.

But most importantly, advertising builds consumption. Now, you may think we consume too much, but without the consumption there will be fewer jobs.

I do with agree with one restriction - drug ads to consumers. In this case over consumption can be directly harmful and expensive. I believe drug ads are limited in Europe, limiting them here will make the life of doctors easier and prevent the invention of fake diseases.

25

Intrusive advertising is annoying and should not be as ubiquitous as it is now. As far as I can tell, advertising is nothing but under-the-hood persuasion and should be regulated. Very little studies on advertising effect on children or whether there is a link between societies with high advertising burdens and attentive disorders (e.g. ADD/ADHD). More study is definitely needed.

None of the those. Let me help:

  1. Advertising are those annoying pop-ups and eye-searing banners that adorn many websites on the Internet (and clicking it will likely lead to a computer virus).
  2. Advertising are the endless ocean of ads, commercials, and testimonials that are on buses, inside airplanes, on every electronic device released, and even on Hulu (You pay for a premium service to be shown commercials - no, really, I am not kidding).
  3. Advertising is when you’re at the movies and you’re being inundated about products and services that you’re not interested in.
  4. Advertising is not an “advertising experience” it is a pointless, stupid exercise that should die.

Advertising should be narrowly tailored and finely targeted. I’ll repeat that in a different way. Advertising should be specifically tailored and targeted to specific consumers. Amazon does (for better or worse) a remarkable job with this and the rest of these businesses ought to take note. It’s annoying to get a coupons about shit you don’t want (like Lee’s press on nails) , but a great once-in-a-lifetime surprise to get a coupon on shit you do want (like Skyrim).

(bolding mine)

Exhibit A: the U.S debt is $17.2 (or ~104% GDP) with annual deficit of about >$600 billion. Exhibit B: The Interstate Highway System is underfunded by trillions of dollars. So, uh, yeah, the U.S needs all of the revenue it get its hands. Tax revenue from annoying and eye-searing advertisements can be used to help roads or extinguish debt. Win-win.

  • Honesty
26

How is that intrinsically different from a Facebook ad highlighting something a friend if yours bought?

Why is a bus ad different from a car bumper sticker? Why is Universal studios paying a bus company to a poster on the side of a bus different from some politician paying me to put a sign on my car?

How is anyone supposed to know EXACTLY what you are interested in? Especially in a movie theater full of people with different interests, and without digitally spying on you?

Again, give me a precise definition of advertising that includes only the example you gave, and not the ones I did. Is product placement advertising? What about giving away free sample?

It almost always is because diffuse, non-specific advertising is inefficient and expensive.

27

It’s not a pop-up nor is it eye-searing. Advertising can be done tastefully (but rarely is).

I am specifically talking about public transportation not vehicles owned by private individuals. Call me old-fashioned, but one should not walk into a train car and see advertisements not only on the walls but on the *ceiling *and on the ground. As the OP notes, this amounts to nothing but visual “noise”.

Ok, I admit you can throw this one out. But deep down, I know you too long for the days when there was no commercials at the movies.

Product placement is fine and free samples are fine. What’s not fine are annoying, eye-searing commercials and advertisements. What is an eye-searing commercials? This one for HeadOn cream, great commercial, right? The fact that the company got to deduct that nightmare of a commercial as a business expense is unconscionable. Might as well go ahead and allow deductions for casino losses, it makes just 'bout as much sense.

Dude (or Girlfriend), are you kidding me? Most advertising is diffuse and inefficient; it is haphazardly flung out like liquid feces from a propeller. The only settings are “low population area” and “high population area”. If advertising was efficient, we wouldn’t need to see the same commercial or advertisement ad nauseum.

  • Honesty
28

(Emphasis in original.)

The debate: What are the merits of government interfering in business;
and the debate: Whether this particular (or any particular) intervention would be beneficial for society . . .

. . . are, to a large degree, the SAME debate. Listen, for example, to all the conservative politicians and pundits on the subject: Their arguments against government interference in business are substantially along these lines: That gov’t interference is bad for society collectively, and absence of gov’t interference is the optimal choice for the greatest benefit to society as a whole. It’s the whole “free market” argument.

While, contrariwise, the liberal/progressive argument holds that the opposite is the case, or at least to some large extent.

How could the two sides of this argument come to such different conclusions? It all has to do with various peoples’ respective definitions of just what is “good” for society. Short of anyone taking sides and putting this thread squarely into Great Debates territory (where the topic has undoubtedly been beaten to death and far beyond), we might simply note that the “laissez-faire” vs. “highly regulated” arguments do each seem to be sort-of “right” in the sense of best promoting their respective proponents’ concepts of what’s best for society.

The OP’s specific question on the merits (or lack thereof) of advertising vs. gov’t regulation of advertising, may fall right within this line of analysis.

29

This thread has brought up a huge range of interesting points that are all dead center in my current professional focus and I’d like to say something about all of them. I may have to be selective on the grounds of time alone - if I’m writing something over in this window, I’m not getting anything done over in the serious zone. (And I have been not-getting-done over there for too long over the holiday and winter season already…)

Bear with me if I take this in pieces rather than try to respond to multiple points in a single post.

Points taken, but I think we all know what ads are, at least for the generalities of this discussion. It’s really a different topic to distinguish between a blaring Sham-Wow ad on TV and an Izod logo on a butt pocket. Ads is ads.

Right out of the Marketing 101 textbook, and thank you. Now that we’ve established that advertising has a beneficial side - at least, from one perspective - let’s not waste further time on it. After all, potassium cyanide is an essential chemical in food production but it’s not something you want to run around sprinkling on the baked goods.

30

Okay, these are all interesting but you need to recognize that they are your minority opinion and not established facts; it’s bogus to argue “opinion-opinion-opinion and therefore fact.” Obviously your opinion begins in the same place as the OP’s - and boils down to I REALLY HATE HATE HATE ADVERTISING - but it’s not particularly useful to keep piling it on to establish that viewpoint. For example, no one here called advertising an “experience,” so an impassioned argument against that silly viewpoint isn’t really needed. Other than some textbook statements of advertising’s place in the business world, no one here is saying it’s a good thing, either.

I’d suggest that political ads are a special case and should be set aside here. They involve all the elements of this discussion and a whole truckload of other difficult problems like funding, accuracy, limits on political grounds, etc. Just a suggestion.

And there’s the real core of the issue, isn’t it? And a conventionally-stated argument. Let’s come back to this.

It’s worse than that. DTC (direct to consumer) ads for prescription drugs are allowed in only two countries - the US and New Zealand. I completely agree with your other points, but drug ads are on the fringe of consumer-good advertising. They’re not as far off center as political ads but like those they combine all the core issues with a whole set of special ones - so I’d suggest we not get side-tracked on these, either.

Here’s where we can choose which topic this thread is about: the nature, merits and meaning of “advertising” (defined by the OP and Honesty as “negative” in the most sweeping terms) or the use of government in suppressing things we don’t like.

IMVHO, the second argument is meaningless if we don’t agree with the first one - if “advertising” is not a universal blight and cancer on society, then there’s no reason to argue for it being suppressed through either law or economic pressure.

I don’t agree that advertising is universally a bad thing (and further opinions on the point won’t change mine). I also don’t believe a version of Prohibition would be legal, Constitutionally, or that it would work as the OP’s faction believes. Yep, there are people who hate “advertising” with a blind passion and at least three of them are present here - but personal dislike of something is not justification or basis for having it be suppressed.

31

I’ll tell you one area where limiting advertising would “enrich society” (as the OP words it) - billboards. Here in Indiana, we’re adding a big stretch of highway from Indianapolis to Evansville - basically extending the I-69 corridor. It cuts through previously untouched farmland, and is still currently unfinished. I was one of those stretches a few weeks after the concrete was poured, and just marveled at the wide open landscape around me. There wasn’t a billboard in sight for miles and miles. Once I got onto I-70, with a billboard every few hundred feet, it was depressing.

Completely unrealistic, I know.

32

Yes. In part. Part of the nature of advertising is to distract us from the fact that we’re being persuaded, sold to and conditioned by it. It’s magician’s patter, telling us that we’re not really seeing what we’re seeing. Any ad that doesn’t flat-out shove the product in your face and say BUY THIS FUCKING DISHWASHER SOAP is using other tools to make the sell acceptable, palatable, even desirable. Collectively, advertising works hard to make itself acceptable even though its fundamental role is abrasive and unpleasant.

If I were to encapsulate that in a single example, it would be this: Some huge number of people went out of their way to spend most of Sunday in front of a TV set because they were going to see some really, really wonderful ads. They even say so. Some good number of them actually mean it - the Big Game :smiley: is irrelevant distraction; they want to see the Apple or Captain American II or Chevy ad they’ve been teased about for weeks. Even though the message is still GO SEE THIS FUCKING MOVIE.

It’s not a conspiracy in the sense that advertisers get together in a back room or board room and plot their moves, alla while rubbing their oily hands in glee. It is a conspiracy in the way 100 million people collectively encouraged each other to spend last Sunday on the couch with a mountain of beer and snax. The advertising world is a self-supporting, self-educating and self-sustaining “conspiracy” driven by thousands of independent players whose efforts all support the cause - even ad campaigns by bitter rivals feed the notion of what advertising is and thus benefit the whole.

But no, it’s not a “conspiracy” in any meaningful sense of the word, except maybe Abbie Hoffman’s use of it in the Chicago trial - “to breathe together.”

Advertising is - also - a way to influence consumer opinion regardless of fact; it is a way to drive sales for products that no one would otherwise buy. I don’t think most people would object to “factual” advertising that merely announces the presence of a business or product. I think that’s the only segment your statement fully applies to. When the misdirection, misstatements and outright lies begin, your statement is still valid, but it becomes a smaller and smaller part of the whole picture, and the rest of that picture can get pretty ugly.

Let’s face it, would ANYONE buy Bose, Dyson or Monster products if they did no advertising? Or only “factual” advertising limited to the bare offering of the product? (“12-foot HDMI cable. $99.” - riiiiiggght.)

Would they, now?

Perhaps the real solution here is media that are not the handmaidens (to use a polite term) of the advertising “conspiracy.” (Which won’t be achieved by any government intervention.) *Why *do we accept that all but a tiny fraction of our media knowingly bend their content and presentation to the whims of advertisers? (There’s more to that than just saying nice things about advertised goods, or not-saying not-nice things, and so forth.) Take one step back and think about it: the advertising shapes our media, all of it, far more than any other single factor. Why do we tolerate this?

33

To combine these two points, Stewart Elliott in the Times (and I fear I got the spelling wrong on his name) noted that the SuperBowl ads were so nicey nice this year because of the crap some of the advertisers from last year got.

I wonder how many here have ever placed an ad beyond a classified. I’m involved in marketing a conference, and ad trades with professional publication websites have been very effective. Yes, they are banners, and no, people clicking on them don’t get viruses. We also advertise by sending email ti a fairly large mailing list, allowing opt-out, of course.

BTW, I was at MIT when Prof. Bose started the company, and we bought Bose speakers and the Bose turntable through word of mouth. But it is hard to grow a company that way. I wonder what Honesty would recommend.

34

Which is a thumbnail sketch of why trying to legislate ads into… being nice, being pleasing or just being less won’t work. They are a communication art form (no matter how cynical, conniving or “negative”) and thus elude attempts to limit them. Other than flat, enforced bans on certain types of ads (cigarette ads on TV and radio - and note, ONLY on TV and radio) and the sort of added-info requirements imposed on many product ads (including the pages of blather that have to accompany drug ads), most attempts to control, limit or prevent ads have been dismal failures.

At the bottom of the problem is that it’s a free speech issue and there is no Constitutionally justifiable basis for imposing sweeping limits. It’s also an ingrained part of the business cycle and doing so would have far-ranging impact - much further than the OP and Honesty seem to grasp. (I actually can’t make a counter-argument on that basis, though; a lot of my proposals tell the business cycle to get knotted.)

But really, the issue is that advertising is not the problem. To rail at it and treat it as the problem is misdirected… and means that it is succeeding in its collateral job of taking the heat for the real problem.

In 1970 or so, Bose products were outstanding. Now they’re usually upper-tier in performance, but grossly overpriced and sold only on marketing-driven, deceptive terms. (Such as concealed or obfuscated pricing, to start with.) They are “elite” products only because their own advertising says so. I suspect their sales would be a fraction of current levels if they were straightforwardly marketed at a rate proportional to Bose’s size.

35

I don’t think it’s unrealistic. Four US states prohibit billboards: Vermont, Alaska, Hawaii, and Maine. Also in São Paulo, Brazil, billboards and some other advertising is banned.

As much as advertising can be annoying, I wouldn’t dream of eliminating it everywhere. But I don’t think it’s unreasonable to limit it, or restrict it from certain places, like highway billboards and schools.

36

Advertising is basically all manipulation and lies. If it isn’t, we just call it “information”.

Look at what they call “underwriting” on nonprofit independent or public radio stations. “This production is brought to you by Bill’s Shoes, 123 Main Street, Saginaw. Selling Men’s and Women’s shoes, boots and sandals since 1982.”

Advertising goes way beyond that, using false superlatives, misleading copy, calls to action, and peer pressure, at best. At worst it’s just lies. There is nothing free about “buy one get one free”, for instance. It’s a lie. Sales, “deals”, “limited time only” – these are psychological games. Manipulation. Often, the “everyday” price the sale prices is marked down from, is a lie. Misleading propaganda at best. Straight up fraud at worst. This is the everyday “harmless” content we allow our children and politicians to watch.

And that’s just traditional television, radio and print advertising. What passes for advertising on the internet is uniformly despicable. I’d call most of it malware.

Advertising is bad. Really bad. It is a disease at best. Really, the only thing worse is censorship, which I will not support. I would support these measures, however:

I’d be cool with some time and place restrictions. I can freely tell you I’m a lawyer here on the Dope. But if I take your money, offer legal advice, and represent you in court, I’d better be a freaking lawyer (I’m not), or the government will come down on me. That’s not really censorship. That’s fraud. The government needs to strictly discourage fraud, and by my definition that includes a lot of currently accepted “advertisements”.

Furthermore, the government needs to do research and make honest, unbiased information freely available to the public. It doesn’t matter what Del Monte puts on their fruit cocktail labels if I have a trusted, current source of unbiased information elsewhere. This is what the FDA should be doing. Don’t tell me I can’t take viagra without a doctor’s prescription; tell me what taking viagra does to me and let me make my own decision. Simply having a trusted source of unbiased information mitigates most of the harm from malicious advertisements. It’s a big undertaking, but a role I think the government has a duty to fill, over and above a lot of its other less important undertakings.

Unfortunately the government has been captured by large businesses, and will never be trustworthy in regards to them. So I could give a crap less what they do about advertisements, because any cure they could attempt would be worse than the disease.

37

Yes, of course ads influence consumer opinion. It’s up to the consumer to sort the facts from the puffery. The rule “Let the buyer beware” goes back to when folks spoke Latin. Ads not only sell you a brand of what you wanted, but they sell you things you didn’t know you wanted. You have the option to say no, though. No ad forces you to buy something.

I said that mags, papers, and TV would fail without ad revenue, and Amateur Barbarian said:

Yes, they would. Do a little research, and you’ll find that those media get most of their revenue from ads.

You are accurate when you say that some media tailor their content to cosset the advertisers. An article in Ms. magazine a while back asserted that “women’s” magazines are guiltier of that than most. (Ms. is a non-profit, and sells no ads.) You can go through any other women’s mag, and you’ll see that an ad is cuddled up to an article pushing the hot new makeup, hair stuff, or fashions. Advertisers demand this placement, with a threat of yanking the ads.

I felt a bit snobbish about that until I opened the new Rolling Stone to find the stars of some TV show on the cover, all in the same brand of jeans, which had ads on the first 3 pages for those jeans. The piece about the show was bracketed by double page ads for that network.

You use Bose, Dyson, and Monster Cables as examples of products that sensible people would not buy without ads. Bose and Dyson make “at least pretty good” products. IMHO, Monster’s success is due to salesman kickbacks, not ads. I’ve never seen a Monster Cables ad.

38

So nothing sellers do can be wrong, since a smart buyer won’t fall for baloney? Any bad purchase is the buyer’s fault? Overconsumption is a failure of will power?

(Sarcasm warning this time) No, really? :smiley:

It’s not that I dispute media makes all or most of its money from ad revenue… I just suggest that they would find ways to survive if it all went away. Saying any form of “ads are necessary because they support the media” is self-serving nonsense for both industries.

I’d say I’m accurate when I say that all media do so. It’s much more than fawning over advertiser’s products.

39

Amateur : one simple comment. The basic argument is that “advertising” can be defined as “spending money” to spread messages about your product.

My naive solution, having considered the arguments above, would be to do the following :

I would write a law that defines advertising in the broadest way possible. Any transaction that involves spending money or giving product for below cost for the purposes of spreading information about the product counts. It would be subject to a significant tax on the transaction to “internalize the externality” per my textbook in microeconomics 101.

Putting a logo on your product does count, but the tax is on the cost of the transaction. Since the cost of carving the logo is minimal, the tax would not affect it much. If other people you did not pay or give free product to want to inform the world about your product, that’s fine.

In the USA, specifically, we already are in a situation where taxes must go up. End of line.

The reason taxes must rise is because there are large liabilities (medicare/social security/military committment) that no amount of spending reduction can meet. Refusing to raise taxes now and go into debt instead is actually raising taxes on the future, with interest. Basically, every time a particular political party “cuts taxes” when the country is running a deficit is actually a bigger tax increase on the future.

So putting taxes on negative actions taken by others (on say advertising, carbon dioxide emission, sale of unhealthy food loaded with sugar to make it more addictive, sale of financial derivatives…) makes a lot of sense.

40

I’d like stronger controls on advertising, but only in some specific places. I’d like to see billboards reduced on highways. I’d particularly like to see flashing/changing/video billboards made illegal, since I think they’re actively distracting drivers.

I’d like to see stronger truth in advertising laws. If the ad taken as a whole would lead a reasonable person to conclude something that’s clearly false, that should not be legal.

I disagree that pervasiveness of advertising is a major problem in general. I think it’s dumb that people who pay for Hulu+ also have to watch ads, which is why I don’t subscribe to it. I don’t like ads in movie theaters either, so I rarely go. I don’t think we have a right to media without advertising.