[jackthetab]

Non-flamebait question: But how do you know to look it up in the first place? Word of mouth from friends or reviewers, i.e. influencers?

Unless we're defining "ads" to mean "interstitial video|aural ads", then I'll concede the point.

[flir]

You mean how do I find cinemas that are local to me? (Or streaming services, I guess). Again, pull. Search engines. Various categories of information broker.

What I'm pushing back against is the idea that advertising is necessary for society to function. I'm defining advertising in the broadest sense I can for the purposes of the thought experiment - information that you pay to have put in front of people. It can be entirely replaced by information that I pay to access.

It always will exist of course, because the incentives of a seller aren't aligned with mine, but it isn't necessary.

[thfuran]

I'm not sure what you mean. Are you asking how someone who has never heard of the idea of a movie will find out what movie releases are upcoming? Is that really the sort of outlier we want to structure our society around?

[vel0city]

Most of the movies I've seen were because of a poster hung someplace or a trailer playing before a movie at the theater or something sparked an interest in seeing it. Movie posters hanging on the wall are a form of advertising. If we didn't allow movie posters to be hung or trailers to be played I would have not known about a lot of movies I've enjoyed over the years.

[thfuran]

Are you sure you wouldn't have? If you knew you like watching movies and knew that the way to find out what movies were coming out was to ask rather than have them plastered all over everything, would you really never have done so?

[vel0city]

I definitely would have missed a ton of movies that I just would have never known existed.

Since having kids, I don't go to movie theaters very often. Since I don't go to theaters, I don't see the displays hyping new movies, I don't see the posters there, I don't see the trailers. I don't watch regular TV so I don't get many ads. If you were to ask me for 5 sci-fi movies that came out recently several years ago, I'd be able to easily tell you some that I at least wanted to see, if I hadn't already seen them. These days? I couldn't tell you two in the last two years. I still like movies, I'm just no longer passively surrounded by movie-info, so I don't get any of that info.

And so yeah, I'm absolutely certain I've so far missed out on many movies that I probably would have enjoyed, I just never knew they existed, largely because I haven't been exposed to any advertising of those movies. Movies that I would have known about, had I been subjected to ads for them.

I'm currently living in that world of needing to pull up the cinema's website to know what movies are out there, and I absolutely know far less about movies I'd like to see. Because I'm not going to just pull up the cinema's website every few days to see what movies are currently out there just to see "nope nothing I'm interested in", its a lot easier when the information comes to me.

I fully agree, not all advertising is good, a lot is actively harmful! But at the same time, advertising can be useful, even as the consumer.