[joreilly]

Performing the same though-exercise, I find myself with a different conclusion; I despise physical advertising. I hate driving down the high-way and seeing a massive billboard for who-even-cares interrupting the fields and forests. I don't want to have products pushed at me while walking around downtown. São Paulo removed all billboards/branding/advertising with their Clean City Law [0] in 2007 and the difference before and after is massive. It immediately looked so much more clean and beautiful (at least for the parts of the city they photographed, probably some selection bias here). Assuming that billboards and advertising are somehow putting money into the government's pockets, I would gladly raise my taxes to eradicate public advertising permanently. Bringing the analogy back to digital advertising, I'd be happy to pay some sort of monthly fee to "The Internet" to receive access to it and never see an ad or be tracked again, perhaps similar to what Coil [1] is attempting, but somehow at full-internet scale. Naturally, how this could be implemented is far beyond me, as are the economics behind advertising, so I suppose I'm doing little more than wistful thinking.

If I had to compromise, I would agree that more agency and less intrusive ads and tracking are a start.

[0]: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...

[1]: https://coil.com/

[jimkleiber]

> São Paulo removed all billboards/branding/advertising with their Clean City Law [0] in 2007 and the difference before and after is massive. It immediately looked so much more clean and beautiful...

Reminds me of how one day, I think in SF, I was trying to go around without reading things and just realized there are so many things shouting at me with words, especially billboards and other forms of public advertising. I would love to even have a city here in the US experiment with something like this.

> I would gladly raise my taxes to eradicate public advertising permanently

I would, too, especially as a consumer, and yet, as a producer, I wonder how annoyed I would be without ads. Maybe there's a balance, and I believe needs to be have more consumer voice, and less producer voice.

> Naturally, how this could be implemented is far beyond me, as are the economics behind advertising, so I suppose I'm doing little more than wistful thinking.

Lol, me too. I guess it comes down to how much does advertising actually work and if advertising disappeared, what downstream impacts would it have on the economy (and would those be "bad")?

I think part of the reason I'd like to go into public office is to run these experiments and also I feel sad that more public offices don't seem to run that many experiments :-)

[joreilly]

> Reminds me of how one day, I think in SF, I was trying to go around without reading things and just realized there are so many things shouting at me with words, especially billboards and other forms of public advertising. I would love to even have a city here in the US experiment with something like this.

I'm in the exact same position, I'd love to see a large-scale experiment to determine the economic and psychological impact of removing public advertising, or at least reducing it to a more "comfortable" level, whatever that may be. The Canadian government experimented a bit with universal basic income in the 70s, and more again recently with COVID, so perhaps they'd be willing to give this a shot as well.

> I would, too, especially as a consumer, and yet, as a producer, I wonder how annoyed I would be without ads. Maybe there's a balance, and I believe needs to be have more consumer voice, and less producer voice.

Another concern/shortcoming I forgot to address above is what companies will do to get their products out there; will advertising take a more subtle, perverse tone if they're not allowed billboards and banner ads? Perhaps a middle-ground will stop a more covert extreme from appearing. Perhaps I'm falling for the middle ground fallacy.

[distances]

I agree totally. There's not that much physical world advertising in my part of Europe (e.g. almost no road side banners at all), but I still despise how we've sold bus stops and metro walls to the highest bidder. Public space should be advertisement-free as you can't opt out of it.

Private spaces like inside shopping malls is fine for me.

[jimkleiber]

I like that distinction between public and private spaces. And I think those rules exist in many places (at least in the US) but maybe not as strict as you may be desiring. I'm pretty sure my town has restrictions on how tall/big billboards can be, and I know they used to have restrictions about how tall the McDonald's or other restaurant signs could be.

I like the idea that inside a private building is opt-in/consent, whereas outside of it is not.

[joreilly]

Parroting jimkleiber, I like the distinction between advertising in public and private spaces, although I suppose it would be a matter of being adamant that anywhere that isn't in a private building, isn't private space.

> There's not that much physical world advertising in my part of Europe (e.g. almost no road side banners at all), but I still despise how we've sold bus stops and metro walls to the highest bidder

I lived in Germany for a few months and was shocked to see advertisements for cigarettes on the sides of the local buses. I suppose this will be changing in 2022, so a good first step [0].

[0]: https://www.thelocal.de/20200918/germany-set-to-ban-cigarett...

[randcraw]

Totally agree. To that end, I'd like to propose a new inverse model for advertising in America where every consumer gets to sell airtime on their eyeballs. Each time an advertiser wants to promote something to me, I get to charge them a fee — aprice that's set by me. Henceforth, every advertiser who wants to stick their ad in my face must pay for the privilege to do so.

Now that Near Field Comm has arrived and active invasive advertising soon is likely follow us everywhere we go, it's time we consumers reasserted ourselves and took back control of our eyeballs.