[AnthonyMouse]

How does word-of-mouth communication propagate knowledge that is currently in the possession of zero existing customers? Or operate for products that people have little reason to discuss with other people?

Suppose you sell insulation and replacing the insulation in an existing house could save $2 in heating and cooling for each $1 the insulation costs. Most people know that insulation exists, but what causes them to realize that they should be in the market for it when they "already have it"?

[mrob]

People don't need to discuss specific products, they only need to be aware of the existence of product categories. If it's genuinely the case that whole product categories are unknown to many people who could realistically benefit from them, as determined by a disinterested third party, an exception could be made for advertising that does not mention specific products or brands.

The insulation example can be solved by publication of data on average heating costs. When people learn that their neighbors are paying less they will be naturally incentivized to investigate why. Equivalent problems can be solved with the same general technique.

[AnthonyMouse]

> If it's genuinely the case that whole product categories are unknown to many people who could realistically benefit from them, as determined by a disinterested third party, an exception could be made for advertising that does not mention specific products or brands.

Now all of the "brought to you by America's <industry group>" ads are back in. So is every pharma ad and every other patented product because they don't have to tell you a brand when there is only one producer.

> The insulation example can be solved by publication of data on average heating costs.

Publication where? In the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"? Also, who decides to publish it, decides what it will say or pays the costs of writing and distributing it?

[mrob]

An industry group is not a disinterested party. Minimum competition requirements can be imposed. As I said elsewhere in the thread, a solution being imperfect is not a good reason to leave the problem unaddressed.

[AnthonyMouse]

> An industry group is not a disinterested party.

No, but they can convince a disinterested party that people aren't aware of <fact about industry that industry wants people to know> because that's actually true.

> Minimum competition requirements can be imposed.

But that brings back the original problem. Company invents new patented invention, how does anybody find out about it?

> a solution being imperfect is not a good reason to leave the problem unaddressed.

This is the legislator's fallacy. Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do this.

If a proposal is full of problems and holes, the alternative isn't necessarily to do nothing, but rather to find a different approach to the problem.

Proposals that are full of holes are often worse than nothing, because the costs are evaluated in comparison to the ostensible benefit, but then in practice you get only a fraction of the benefit because of the holes. And then people say "well a little is better than nothing" while not accounting for the fact that weighing all of the costs against only a fraction of the benefit has left you underwater.

[mrob]

Advertising causes great harm. Banning advertising, or better yet, making it economically nonviable without restricting freedom of speech, solves this problem. As already pointed out by several other posts in this thread, the purported benefits of advertising are already available through non-harmful means.

But I acknowledge that there may be edge cases. My point is that the existence of edge cases does not mean we should permit the harm to continue. Those specific edge cases can be identified and patched. My suggestion is a hypothetical example of a potential such patch, one that might possibly be a net benefit. Maybe it would actually be a net harm, and the restriction should be absolute. The specifics don't matter, it's merely an example to illustrate how edge cases might be patched.

Your objections to this hypothetical example are nit-picking the edge cases of an edge case. They're so insignificant in comparison to the potential harm reduction of preventing advertising that they can be safely ignored.

[AnthonyMouse]

No, the problem is that the "edge cases" will swallow the rule if you make an exception for every instance where advertising is actually serving a purpose, but if you don't make those exceptions then you would have created so many new problems or require so many patches that each carry its own overhead and opportunity for cheating or corruption that the costs would vastly exceed the benefits.

> The specifics don't matter, it's merely an example to illustrate how edge cases might be patched.

Only it turned out to be an example to illustrate how patching the edge cases might be a quagmire.

[coldtea]

>Suppose you sell insulation and replacing the insulation in an existing house could save $2 in heating and cooling for each $1 the insulation costs. Most people know that insulation exists, but what causes them to realize that they should be in the market for it when they "already have it"?

The same legit things that can cause them to realize it today. Word of mouth, a product review, a personal search that landed them on a new company website, a curated catalog (as long as those things are not selling their placements).

An ad is the worse thing to find such things out - the huge majority ranges from misleading to criminally misleading to bullshit.