| > 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 :-) |
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.