I have a SaaS business which exists ONLY because of advertising. It’s highly niche, really the only product that does what it does, and a few dozen people a day click through from Google Ads and find that I have a product to automate something they had been spending hundreds of hours on. You should see the effusive thank you notes I get if you think advertising is pointless. This product wouldn’t exist without Google Ads because I would have no way to find the 50 people a day worldwide who need it.
I won’t even share it’s name, why would I open source it? Lol. It makes a decent amount of money and requires close to 0 engineering know how to build. So no, I will continue to let it make money quietly...
The things I buy may be advertised, but I buy nothing based on ads. I see almost no ads because I pay to remove them from all services that allow me to, and the rest I block.
I search for a product based on its category, read reviews, and find unpaid recommendations from things like Consumer Reports or Wirecutter.
Computers. And if you want to be pedantic, you'll say but they would exist for military etc!!!!!
But if you're not being pedantic you'll agree that most stuff relating to computing exists in its current form in lockstep with yhe ability of companies to sell and therefore advertise their products.
Not just computers but everything related to them too.
Companies would absolutely be able to sell stuff without advertising their products. Self education, word of mouth, and 3rd-party informational sources has been enough for a lot of products. Purely informational advertising - the kind you'll see in an extremely old newspaper - would probably not be considered cancerous by the author of this article.
Tune into the TV during a sporting event tonight and you won't see some new information about a product that solved a problem you didn't know how to solve. You'll see problems that you didn't know you had, solved in ways no rational person would expect: Your problem is not enough attractive women making eyes at you? Solution: Buy new car. Your problem is life doesn't consist of exciting parties with cool youths? Solution: Buy light beer. Your problem is you're not a professional race car driver? Solution: Buy chunky watch. And if you missed the message, the same three commercials will air during the next ad break in 6 minutes, and you'll see them when you look at your phone or computer, in the wad of glossy ads cocooned within the thin pages of your newspaper, and you'll hear about them on the radio until the host decides it's time to play another song.
That kind of advertising may be necessary for Budweiser to keep up with Coors, or for Ford to keep up with GM, but if it disappeared tomorrow, people would still know that beer and cars were a thing. People might make smarter choices on how much alcohol to drink and when to be content with their current transportation instead of buying a new car, and sales might go down a little, but that would not spell the end of society.
Oh, sales might go down a little. So GM doesn't advertise their latest model and it doesn't sell as much. No worries. It's not like the livelihood of thousands of people is at stake. They'll just find other jobs. Who cares about them?
Replace GM with a factory, and advertising with dumping toxic waste into the local river. Would you still cry about the lost jobs if someone proposed banning dumping toxic waste into rivers?
Strawman argument. When advertising works it has some upside for everyone (customers, platforms and advertisers), dumping toxic waste only benefits the dumper.
I don't see the upside of the crapton of billboards I pass daily, or the flashing, potentially malware-inducing garbage I would see everywhere on the Internet if I turned my ad blocker.
Advertising has ridiculous externalities; this is what makes it similar to the toxic waste scenario.
The two scenarios aren't that different. Sure, poisoning rivers is worse. But my point is that "think of the jobs it supports" is a poor argument for a practice that hurts people at large.
The home PC revolution was started in big part by accident when IBM made a computer that was both cheap and easy to clone. They became the leader against other, much better recognized computer brands, clones appeared left and right, and here we are.
They became the leader because their product was a better market fit, and not because of advertising. If anything, PCs actually canibalized the products that IBM was actively trying to market (mainframes come to mind).
And then there's Unix and GNU/Linux, the OS of choice for servers.
Home computers were initially a novelty item, sold mainly through direct-response advertisements in magazines like Popular Electronics. This early hobbyist market created the economies of scale that made a mass market home computer a possibility.
In the late 70s and early 80s, most people simply had no idea why they would want a computer; The first home computer adverts in the mainstream media didn't really sell the benefits of one computer over another, but sold the idea of the computer:
Without that kind of advertising, it's entirely plausible to believe that home computers might have been a fad, with the computer resigned to being a specialist tool for business and industry. There's a parallel universe where the home computer and video game boom never happened because nobody told consumers why they might want a computer, the 6502 and Z80 remained niche microprocessors for embedded applications, Woz went back to HP and Bill Gates finished his degree and got a job at Honeywell.
The fact that people were already reading about electronics in magazines they bought with their own money shows that people would have known what computers were regardless. Those advertisements only worked because the audience was already interested in computers. Those computers also already existed and the notion that no one would have used a computer if an ad didn't tell them to is absurd. Computers exist because they're useful and fun and they were purchased by people who wanted computers and were willing to seek out products they wanted.
"In it's current form" is quite the qualifier. "Hey, computers would probably not look exactly the way they do right now if we had changed something thirty years ago".
I don't know whether there are examples (aside from "the funniest advertisements" shows), but computers certainly aren't one.