Education is certainly one part, but we could also shift business models away from advertising. Ads are a cancer on content and attention, and the fact that so much of the economy is centered around them is mind boggling.
Ads are often the lowest hanging fruit for ROI. Is it often far easier (less time consuming, less resource intensive, less risky) to manipulate human perception at large into buying your product than providing a functionally better product. Techniques are well established and broad reaching across all domains since it focuses on the consumer's perception. There's a reason businesses pour so much money into marketing and advertising.
Even if you do provide a functionally better product/service than competitors, it's often easier for a competitor to convince consumers their product/service is better than your functionally better product/service, if nothing else, by hiding in ambiguity and complexity or well crafted claims that deceive consumers.
There's also the obvious case that if you have an overall better product/service, if people don't know about it, it's not likely to succeed by word-of-mouth alone (there are exceptions) so advertising to aide discovery provides a necessary function but not to the level of manipulative practices we have today (marketing) that are employing sophisticated psychological techniques and are now even driven by targeted behavior data.
It's one thing to inform people "Hey we made this, it exists, it does this, and here's the cost, you can get it here..." but it's another thing entirely to manipulate consumers perception or play on behavioral faults over--I don't know--delivering a product or service of genuine value?
Given modern business environments, it seems to me that it's often financially best to deliver the minimal functional product/service a consumer will accept and convince them its better than it is (manipulate perceived value). That, to me also, doesn't create a strong economy, it creates a system that helps disproportionately redistribute wealth to those who can (and will) play that game.
And manufacturing may be cheaper without worrying about polluting or waste dumping, but when those were no curtailed, manufacturing didn't stop, it just found better ways.
Banning advertising doesn’t make this problem go away unless you can also enforce it worldwide. If Google went away, you will have Baidu or Yandex pick up the business. Are we in a position to regulate them too?
Remember that ads existed before internet. They also had the same fundamental problems. Only those days one had to be rich to muck with society
It also doesn't solve the issue that ads are trying to address in the first place, which is to promote your business.
If you outright ban ads, they'll come back in a sneaky way, see influencer marketing / product placement in culture (movies mostly) for how it plays out.
It also prevents smaller businesses to compete with the larger ones because the larger ones have much more clout and branding power.
Not that it makes ads perfect, far from it. But at least ads are transparent unlike all the astro-turfing there is out there.
> Banning advertising doesn’t make this problem go away unless you can also enforce it worldwide.
It makes the problem go away to a certain degree in areas were ads are banned. If we banned ads in Europe and US, Russians using Yandex and Chinese people using Baidu would still see ads but we would not.
However we wouldn't see much at all for a while I guess since a number of big internet companies seem to be almost clueless when it comes to ordinary decent business models like "I pay you money, you provide me service without telling every shady tracker in the process.
So I'm not arguing for a ban on advertising as that is completely unrealistic, would hurt tje economy badly, woild be next to impossible to enforce and also counterproductive: I've seen ads that improved my day or even my life.
But I certainly wouldn't cried if someone had stopped WhatsApp from selling out to Facebook. And I certainly wouldn't have cried if online ads became more like ads in newspapers and magazines: static, doesn't move, doesn't make noise, doesn't send requests, embedded into the page server side instead of running giant multi-kilobyte applications in my browser.
Maybe I'd even stop blocking ads of they were less dumb, more relevant and didn't make my computer crawl.
