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What If We Made Advertising Illegal? (simone.org)

submitted 2 days ago by sundrei to c/mildlyinteresting@lemmy.world

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The idea feels like sci-fi because you're so used to it, imagining ads gone feels like asking to outlaw gravity. But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence. Word-of-mouth and community networks worked just fine. First-party websites and online communities would now improve on that.

The traditional argument pro-advertising—that it provides consumers with necessary information—hasn't been valid for decades.

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[–] ZMoney@lemmy.world 19 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Sao Paolo did this in 2006.

Under the cult of the "Invisible Hand of the Free Market", the prevailing ideology of neoclassical economics and the modern global economy, advertising is not necessary. Why should a firm have to convince me to buy anything if the market dictates prices and the flow of commodities? Yet here we are.

[–] fermuch@lemmy.ml 6 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

How did it go? Why did they stop it?

[–] MouldyCat@feddit.uk 3 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

As far as I can tell, they didn't stop it - outdoor advertising is still banned there. It was hard finding recent online information about it though. The most recent references I found were a two-year-old discussion on Hacker News and a 2022 article from the BBC which mentions São Paulo's ban and says that Grenoble in France has something similar.

[–] fermuch@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Thank you for the links. I've been there recently, and everything felt cold and gray. I could not really understand why, since all of Brazil feels so charming, green and vivid. Maybe your argument explains a part of it: since there is no advertising, there aren't many colors on the streets (it might've been my impression, tho').

[–] MouldyCat@feddit.uk 2 points 8 hours ago

that's interesting that you mention that - never been there myself or anything, but I did come across reports that the city authorities had relaxed rules on large murals to make up for the lack of advertising, and there's certainly a lot of pictures of some pretty impressive artworks!

[–] noughtnaut@lemmy.world 2 points 12 hours ago

I'm grateful to you for digging those up.