7 ms·

I find the "ads are useful" argument frustratingly disingenuous. It's a transparent and deliberate attempt to move the discussion away from what people actually

I find the "ads are useful" argument frustratingly disingenuous. It's a transparent and deliberate attempt to move the discussion away from what people actually take issue with in modern internet advertising - tracking and data collection - and instead tries to frame it as something far more benign. The ads. Aren't. The problem. The stalking is. Ads can be useful. But no one is saying they aren't! So why is it constantly the case that when internet users make the simple and reasonable request "Please, can you just not stalk us everywhere we go?" the response is "but we're helping you!" The parasitic advertising industry likes to pretend we're in a symbiotic relationship while conveniently ignoring the actual symbiotic solution (see e.g., DDG) because it won't make them nearly as much money.

the_snooze 6y ago
>The ads. Aren't. The problem. The stalking is. Exactly. If you want online ads done right, look no further than how podcasts do it. The medium doesn't allow for stalking. Podcast producers often stake their own reputation by voicing the ads themselves. That editorial freedom lets them be creative and respectful of their audiences. And advertisers can use podcast-specific coupon codes to attribute ad campaigns to sales. It's a win-win for everyone.
- mrblampo 6y ago
  > The medium doesn't allow for stalking. Huh. Are you sure? I don't know anything about how podcast advertising works, but it sounds like you're assuming the full audio track, complete with ads, is the same everywhere and always.
  - exhilaration 6y ago
    Relevant: Spotify will use everything it knows about you to target podcast ads https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/8/21056336/spotify-streaming-ad-insertion-technology-ces-launch https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/8/21056336/spotify-streaming...
    - the_snooze 6y ago
      Spotify is a bit of an oddball in the podcast world in that they're an all-in-one closed platform with a player and a production arm. They can easily feed user behavior data back to their podcast producers and advertisers. Most podcasts and players operate on RSS feeds though. While they can very well target things via IP addresses and user-agent (no getting around that), podcasters and their advertisers don't have the capability to read/write persistent tracking data on the client, at least as far as I know. An advertiser would be hard-pressed to see that I personally listen to Stuff You Should Know and This American Life, even if the advertiser had contracts with both. The medium really hobbles how much tracking can be done.
  - earthboundkid 5y ago
    Traditionally, podcasts worked like radio and everyone got the same ad. Recently, people have been trying to "innovate" by ruining podcasts like how the web was ruined and use dynamic ad insertion. AFAICT, it still hasn't totally caught on yet. Anecdotally, I used to hear it on one of my shows, but then they changed networks and it went away.
- fxleach 6y ago
  The issue is that you cannot have good online advertising without a little bit of the stalking. Do you listen to podcasts? Their ads are shite. I don't want to hear another ad about "Coroner" on Netflix. The only reason they are making money is because podcasts are "hot" right now and everyone is throwing money at them. That money pile will slowly deplete in due time and they'll find a way to introduce ads that are more targeted towards the individual that's listening and guess what, we'll be right back here with the same supposed problem.
  - hiq 6y ago
    > The issue is that you cannot have good online advertising without a little bit of the stalking. The usual answer to this is to use the context rather than personal information and browsing history. You bring less value to the company advertising their product, but I'd argue that most people are fine with this approach. The problem is that current incentives lead to a race to the bottom: if some advertisers are less ethical, they can arguably bring more value to their clients, and the ethical advertiser cannot compete anymore.
    - the_snooze 6y ago
      I hate to be cynical, but I think the reason why online advertisers keep harping on about the "benefits" of personalized ads is that it justifies their existence. They can keep trying to sell whiz-bang audience profiling and attribution technology, even if it doesn't work all that well. Contextual advertising, on the other hand, is simple. It shifts the focus away from technology and toward people: recognizing your audience and crafting a message to them, instead of trying to have a computer do it for you. It's old-fashioned marketing.
  - Smaug123 6y ago
    Well, Slate Star Codex and its sidebar of ads was a good counterexample. I would routinely click through to find out more, because its ads were a) aesthetically pleasing (they had a consistent style, for example) and b) highly relevant to my interests (because a very consistent type of person is interested in the ads on that particular site). To a lesser extent, I think the human-delivered ads given by the presenters of The Magnus Archives podcast were decent enough, though the algorithmic ones were predictably useless. It's possible to target ads to a specific audience by exploiting the selection effect that led to your audience existing. This doesn't favour general-audience communities, sure, but I'd honestly be happy with the answer "general-audience things just aren't how the future looks".
cm2012 6y ago
Okay, do you have an example of someone being hurt by tracking and data collection done by Facebook and Google?
- kreeben 6y ago
  I'm not them but from the top of my mind, an example: 1. Facebook tracks users across the internet to enrich the profiles of their users 2. Data leaks. 3. Users are now in trouble. I can come up with many more if you ask and then give me a sec.
  - cm2012 6y ago
    This doesn't actually happen though. When FB is hacked its the same banal hacks anyone else has, phone numbers, etc.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  Sure. FB knows your ethnicity. In violation of US federal law, this information is used to show you different apartment ads. This makes it harder for black people to live in integrated communities. Similar things happen with jobs and ethnicity, jobs and gender, with jobs and age discrimination, etc.
  - cm2012 5y ago
    FB does enforce the fair housing act and other laws. The platform is actually quite strict nowadays and catches lots of innocent ads in their filters for protected categories. Ad platforms should follow the law, that's working as planned.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      FB may do so now but that's only because of lawsuits as recently as 2019. It wasn't something they volunteered to do. But you asked how targeted ads hurt people, and I showed a fairly recent example. Something that wouldn't exist without targeted advertising. How does that not prove my point?
jefftk 6y ago
> The ads. Aren't. The problem. The stalking is. My primary work is on https://github.com/WICG/turtledove https://github.com/WICG/turtledove (discussed in the post), which allows well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers
- aflag 5y ago
  Hm, with that system, isn't it possible for the advertiser to ultimately know which users saw the ads and ultimately what their interests are?
  - jefftk 5y ago
    Nope! The proposal includes: * Ads render inside "fenced frames" where they cannot learn what page they are on and the page cannot learn what ad is being shown * Reporting is available, but it is aggregate-only
    - aflag 5y ago
      I've read the original turtledove readme, maybe there's something better, maybe it went over my head. But there is this request: > GET https://first-ad-network.com/.well-known/fetch-ads?interest_group=www.wereallylikeshoes.com_athletic-shoes https://first-ad-network.com/.well-known/fetch-ads?interest_... So, at the very least, the ad network will be able to see your IP and know that you like athletic shoes and visited www.wereallylikeshoes.com. If you visit some other domain first-ad-network.com owns with the same IP whithin a small window of time, it can be pretty confident it's the same person and even store some client side data at that point. It feels like they can construct a reasonably good profile about their users by using that technique. That's considering the browser doesn't leak out any other potentially identifying information. Then, the actual ad owner could have something in the URL that identifies which campaign you ultimately came from, as they probably know which interest groups they were targeting. So, when you click on the ad, they know one interest about you and, if you clicked in ads from other campaigns they run, they may reconstruct your profile well.
jjj1232 6y ago
The stalking is the problem, but the ads are too. Ads have been a problem well before tracking was a thing. Since at least the 1920s (I’m thinking of Edward Bernays but there are probably earlier examples) the goal of advertising is to manipulate consumers into making irrational decisions. The majority of ads make us feel inadequate to get us to buy something, like the only the thing that will make us whole is a new instant pot or whatever.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  > The majority of ads make us feel inadequate to get us to buy something I know it's hard to disprove but I don't think adverts have that effect on me, partially it's because I don't see many adverts and partly because that kind of blatant manipulation is so hilariously blatant. I acknowledge that someone might be running a really effective advertising campaign on me but since I basically don't buy anything I don't actually need I can't imagine what that would be.
  - ExtraE 6y ago
    Do you have a new $gadget/$smartphone/$tablet/$whatever? What about your SO/father/niece? (You might not, but I bet a lot of people reading this and agreeing do buy a bunch of stuff they don't need without realizing it).
    - noir_lord 5y ago
      Nope, mobile is three years old, desktop is nearly three, ThinkPad is nearly four. Haven't bought anything techie for about 18mths and when I do mostly shop on specs, reviews from sources I trust. I viscerally loathe advertising, I don't like been manipulated in any context so I run a background process mentally watching for it :). I'm an advertisers nightmare, I'll not only ignore your advertising I'll go to significant technical lengths to block it for myself and everyone in my family.
      - ExtraE 5y ago
        Do you buy brand name clothing? Cereal? Medicine? Did you buy your car/bike/transportation new or used? Where do you go to find a job? Etc
fsflover 6y ago
> The ads. Aren't. The problem. The stalking is. But what about the manipulation?
defaultname 6y ago
But ads are the problem. Ads are the robbery of your time and attention. On a screen they steal screen real estate, consume CPU cycles, consume bandwidth, etc. And all of the stalking and tracking is a direct consequence of ads themselves, further cementing ads as the problem. One of the other replies note that podcasts do ads right. I hugely disagree. Not only does it steal the listener's time and focus (presuming they don't just scrub past it, which I presume most people do unless they put little value on their own time, and think a host is being sincere when they pitch some snake-oil supplement, pillow or VPN), it puts a dirty veneer over the whole realm where everyone becomes half-bit hucksters.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  Many of the primary use-cases for podcasts (exercising/driving/doing chores) don't put people in a position where they have the free hands to scrub past the ads.
ExtraE 6y ago
> it won't make them nearly as much money. Yes. That's the problem. Make less money from ads --> make less content/riskier to make content (same thing). The more money ads make, the fewer of them you have to see to fund the same amount of content (or, alternatively, you get more/higher quality content for a given (fixed) quantity of ads).
- jdbernard 6y ago
  That's not how it plays out though. More effective/profitable ads does not lead to less ads being shown. In fact, it's the opposite. As ads have become more targeted, and theoretically more profitable according to this argument, we have more of them. There is no set "amount of effectiveness," so to speak. If ads are more profitable, advertisers are still going to spend just as much or more on them, precisely because they have a higher ROI.
  - ExtraE 5y ago
    Right, ok. So you see more ads, the people publishing content make more money (more ads + better ads --> more valuable eyeballs --> more valuable content), and then the ROI for making content is higher, so people make + publish more of it. You get more, more valuable content. Now, you may argue that the privacy cost is higher than the reward of more/better content, but I think that it probably isn't. Especially because it's hard (not impossible) to match your browsing history with your IRL identity and no one really cares about you, I think that the privacy cost is smaller than the reward. You might disagree.
    - jdbernard 5y ago
      > You get more, more valuable content There's a couple of non-sequitors here. 1. You don't necessarily get more valuable content. A lot of times the higher ROI leads to gamification of the whole system and you get more content, but it's all spam or varying levels of quality. This spam varies from complete trash to fairly polished, but none of it is actually valuable. 2. Even if we concede the point and assume that we get purely more valuable content, there is a limit to the amount of content anyone can consume in a day. And the advertising itself competes for your attention with even that valuable content. So the benefit from an increased amount of valuable content has a natural limit. The harm from the increase of ads is not so naturally bounded. So even if the balance of cost/benefit starts on the side you think, where the benefit of the content outweighs the cost of advertising, it will naturally, eventually trend towards the cost outweighing the benefit. You are correct that in my view, personally, the cost already far outweighs the benefit. We can argue whether that's true on the whole for most people, but there is no argument when it comes to me personally. It's not worth it. There is a lot of content I only consume because I'm blocking ads. If I was unable to block ads and had to pay that cost, I would certainly forgo the content.
amelius 5y ago
We should research how much ads contribute to overconsumption and hence the demise of the planet. If the connection becomes clear, then there really is no excuse left for ads.
earthboundkid 5y ago
Frame I have used on HN many times: Many people have a favorite TV ads. People watch the Super Bowl for the ads. People sing radio jingles to themselves. College kids put nice magazine ads on their dorm walls. People pay money for clothes with logos that are essentially just ads for themselves. People watch videos of influencers unboxing/using/reviewing products they are paid to unbox/use/review. Etc. People love all kinds of ads. No one likes banner ads. It is failed ad format and should be replaced. No one likes direct targeting. It should be made illegal. There are lots of other ad formats and methods that work great. Those two are the problem.
- the_snooze 5y ago
  People like well-made thoughtful creative ads. Algorithmic targeting misses the point completely. It's the human element that doesn't scale that's valuable.
wpietri 5y ago
I agree that's one problem. But even without stalking as a business model, the point of ads is mostly to manipulate people into buying things with little regard as to utility. Look, for example, at large advertisers like Coca Cola. Coke spends ~$1 billion/year in the US alone on ads. That's not because nobody has heard of them. The point is to shift money into Coke's pockets. Almost all advertising provides no net benefit to society; it's just an arms race between companies competing to manipulate people. If we banned it, we'd quickly find other ways to get people the minimal information content it contains. We'd definitely find ways to spend the $1tn or so that it consumes now. And that's not even counting the benefits from less waste and market distortion caused by advertising.

the_snooze 6y ago

>The ads. Aren't. The problem. The stalking is. Exactly. If you want online ads done right, look no further than how podcasts do it. The medium doesn't allow for stalking. Podcast producers often stake their own reputation by voicing the ads themselves. That editorial freedom lets them be creative and respectful of their audiences. And advertisers can use podcast-specific coupon codes to attribute ad campaigns to sales. It's a win-win for everyone.

mrblampo 6y ago
> The medium doesn't allow for stalking. Huh. Are you sure? I don't know anything about how podcast advertising works, but it sounds like you're assuming the full audio track, complete with ads, is the same everywhere and always.
- exhilaration 6y ago
  Relevant: Spotify will use everything it knows about you to target podcast ads https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/8/21056336/spotify-streaming-ad-insertion-technology-ces-launch https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/8/21056336/spotify-streaming...
  - the_snooze 6y ago
    Spotify is a bit of an oddball in the podcast world in that they're an all-in-one closed platform with a player and a production arm. They can easily feed user behavior data back to their podcast producers and advertisers. Most podcasts and players operate on RSS feeds though. While they can very well target things via IP addresses and user-agent (no getting around that), podcasters and their advertisers don't have the capability to read/write persistent tracking data on the client, at least as far as I know. An advertiser would be hard-pressed to see that I personally listen to Stuff You Should Know and This American Life, even if the advertiser had contracts with both. The medium really hobbles how much tracking can be done.
- earthboundkid 5y ago
  Traditionally, podcasts worked like radio and everyone got the same ad. Recently, people have been trying to "innovate" by ruining podcasts like how the web was ruined and use dynamic ad insertion. AFAICT, it still hasn't totally caught on yet. Anecdotally, I used to hear it on one of my shows, but then they changed networks and it went away.
fxleach 6y ago
The issue is that you cannot have good online advertising without a little bit of the stalking. Do you listen to podcasts? Their ads are shite. I don't want to hear another ad about "Coroner" on Netflix. The only reason they are making money is because podcasts are "hot" right now and everyone is throwing money at them. That money pile will slowly deplete in due time and they'll find a way to introduce ads that are more targeted towards the individual that's listening and guess what, we'll be right back here with the same supposed problem.
- hiq 6y ago
  > The issue is that you cannot have good online advertising without a little bit of the stalking. The usual answer to this is to use the context rather than personal information and browsing history. You bring less value to the company advertising their product, but I'd argue that most people are fine with this approach. The problem is that current incentives lead to a race to the bottom: if some advertisers are less ethical, they can arguably bring more value to their clients, and the ethical advertiser cannot compete anymore.
  - the_snooze 6y ago
    I hate to be cynical, but I think the reason why online advertisers keep harping on about the "benefits" of personalized ads is that it justifies their existence. They can keep trying to sell whiz-bang audience profiling and attribution technology, even if it doesn't work all that well. Contextual advertising, on the other hand, is simple. It shifts the focus away from technology and toward people: recognizing your audience and crafting a message to them, instead of trying to have a computer do it for you. It's old-fashioned marketing.
- Smaug123 6y ago
  Well, Slate Star Codex and its sidebar of ads was a good counterexample. I would routinely click through to find out more, because its ads were a) aesthetically pleasing (they had a consistent style, for example) and b) highly relevant to my interests (because a very consistent type of person is interested in the ads on that particular site). To a lesser extent, I think the human-delivered ads given by the presenters of The Magnus Archives podcast were decent enough, though the algorithmic ones were predictably useless. It's possible to target ads to a specific audience by exploiting the selection effect that led to your audience existing. This doesn't favour general-audience communities, sure, but I'd honestly be happy with the answer "general-audience things just aren't how the future looks".

cm2012 6y ago

Okay, do you have an example of someone being hurt by tracking and data collection done by Facebook and Google?

kreeben 6y ago
I'm not them but from the top of my mind, an example: 1. Facebook tracks users across the internet to enrich the profiles of their users 2. Data leaks. 3. Users are now in trouble. I can come up with many more if you ask and then give me a sec.
- cm2012 6y ago
  This doesn't actually happen though. When FB is hacked its the same banal hacks anyone else has, phone numbers, etc.
HWR_14 5y ago
Sure. FB knows your ethnicity. In violation of US federal law, this information is used to show you different apartment ads. This makes it harder for black people to live in integrated communities. Similar things happen with jobs and ethnicity, jobs and gender, with jobs and age discrimination, etc.
- cm2012 5y ago
  FB does enforce the fair housing act and other laws. The platform is actually quite strict nowadays and catches lots of innocent ads in their filters for protected categories. Ad platforms should follow the law, that's working as planned.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    FB may do so now but that's only because of lawsuits as recently as 2019. It wasn't something they volunteered to do. But you asked how targeted ads hurt people, and I showed a fairly recent example. Something that wouldn't exist without targeted advertising. How does that not prove my point?

jefftk 6y ago

> The ads. Aren't. The problem. The stalking is. My primary work is on https://github.com/WICG/turtledove https://github.com/WICG/turtledove (discussed in the post), which allows well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers

aflag 5y ago
Hm, with that system, isn't it possible for the advertiser to ultimately know which users saw the ads and ultimately what their interests are?
- jefftk 5y ago
  Nope! The proposal includes: * Ads render inside "fenced frames" where they cannot learn what page they are on and the page cannot learn what ad is being shown * Reporting is available, but it is aggregate-only
  - aflag 5y ago
    I've read the original turtledove readme, maybe there's something better, maybe it went over my head. But there is this request: > GET https://first-ad-network.com/.well-known/fetch-ads?interest_group=www.wereallylikeshoes.com_athletic-shoes https://first-ad-network.com/.well-known/fetch-ads?interest_... So, at the very least, the ad network will be able to see your IP and know that you like athletic shoes and visited www.wereallylikeshoes.com. If you visit some other domain first-ad-network.com owns with the same IP whithin a small window of time, it can be pretty confident it's the same person and even store some client side data at that point. It feels like they can construct a reasonably good profile about their users by using that technique. That's considering the browser doesn't leak out any other potentially identifying information. Then, the actual ad owner could have something in the URL that identifies which campaign you ultimately came from, as they probably know which interest groups they were targeting. So, when you click on the ad, they know one interest about you and, if you clicked in ads from other campaigns they run, they may reconstruct your profile well.

jjj1232 6y ago

The stalking is the problem, but the ads are too. Ads have been a problem well before tracking was a thing. Since at least the 1920s (I’m thinking of Edward Bernays but there are probably earlier examples) the goal of advertising is to manipulate consumers into making irrational decisions. The majority of ads make us feel inadequate to get us to buy something, like the only the thing that will make us whole is a new instant pot or whatever.

noir_lord 6y ago
> The majority of ads make us feel inadequate to get us to buy something I know it's hard to disprove but I don't think adverts have that effect on me, partially it's because I don't see many adverts and partly because that kind of blatant manipulation is so hilariously blatant. I acknowledge that someone might be running a really effective advertising campaign on me but since I basically don't buy anything I don't actually need I can't imagine what that would be.
- ExtraE 6y ago
  Do you have a new $gadget/$smartphone/$tablet/$whatever? What about your SO/father/niece? (You might not, but I bet a lot of people reading this and agreeing do buy a bunch of stuff they don't need without realizing it).
  - noir_lord 5y ago
    Nope, mobile is three years old, desktop is nearly three, ThinkPad is nearly four. Haven't bought anything techie for about 18mths and when I do mostly shop on specs, reviews from sources I trust. I viscerally loathe advertising, I don't like been manipulated in any context so I run a background process mentally watching for it :). I'm an advertisers nightmare, I'll not only ignore your advertising I'll go to significant technical lengths to block it for myself and everyone in my family.
    - ExtraE 5y ago
      Do you buy brand name clothing? Cereal? Medicine? Did you buy your car/bike/transportation new or used? Where do you go to find a job? Etc

fsflover 6y ago

> The ads. Aren't. The problem. The stalking is. But what about the manipulation?

defaultname 6y ago

But ads are the problem. Ads are the robbery of your time and attention. On a screen they steal screen real estate, consume CPU cycles, consume bandwidth, etc. And all of the stalking and tracking is a direct consequence of ads themselves, further cementing ads as the problem. One of the other replies note that podcasts do ads right. I hugely disagree. Not only does it steal the listener's time and focus (presuming they don't just scrub past it, which I presume most people do unless they put little value on their own time, and think a host is being sincere when they pitch some snake-oil supplement, pillow or VPN), it puts a dirty veneer over the whole realm where everyone becomes half-bit hucksters.

HWR_14 5y ago
Many of the primary use-cases for podcasts (exercising/driving/doing chores) don't put people in a position where they have the free hands to scrub past the ads.

ExtraE 6y ago

> it won't make them nearly as much money. Yes. That's the problem. Make less money from ads --> make less content/riskier to make content (same thing). The more money ads make, the fewer of them you have to see to fund the same amount of content (or, alternatively, you get more/higher quality content for a given (fixed) quantity of ads).

jdbernard 6y ago
That's not how it plays out though. More effective/profitable ads does not lead to less ads being shown. In fact, it's the opposite. As ads have become more targeted, and theoretically more profitable according to this argument, we have more of them. There is no set "amount of effectiveness," so to speak. If ads are more profitable, advertisers are still going to spend just as much or more on them, precisely because they have a higher ROI.
- ExtraE 5y ago
  Right, ok. So you see more ads, the people publishing content make more money (more ads + better ads --> more valuable eyeballs --> more valuable content), and then the ROI for making content is higher, so people make + publish more of it. You get more, more valuable content. Now, you may argue that the privacy cost is higher than the reward of more/better content, but I think that it probably isn't. Especially because it's hard (not impossible) to match your browsing history with your IRL identity and no one really cares about you, I think that the privacy cost is smaller than the reward. You might disagree.
  - jdbernard 5y ago
    > You get more, more valuable content There's a couple of non-sequitors here. 1. You don't necessarily get more valuable content. A lot of times the higher ROI leads to gamification of the whole system and you get more content, but it's all spam or varying levels of quality. This spam varies from complete trash to fairly polished, but none of it is actually valuable. 2. Even if we concede the point and assume that we get purely more valuable content, there is a limit to the amount of content anyone can consume in a day. And the advertising itself competes for your attention with even that valuable content. So the benefit from an increased amount of valuable content has a natural limit. The harm from the increase of ads is not so naturally bounded. So even if the balance of cost/benefit starts on the side you think, where the benefit of the content outweighs the cost of advertising, it will naturally, eventually trend towards the cost outweighing the benefit. You are correct that in my view, personally, the cost already far outweighs the benefit. We can argue whether that's true on the whole for most people, but there is no argument when it comes to me personally. It's not worth it. There is a lot of content I only consume because I'm blocking ads. If I was unable to block ads and had to pay that cost, I would certainly forgo the content.

amelius 5y ago

We should research how much ads contribute to overconsumption and hence the demise of the planet. If the connection becomes clear, then there really is no excuse left for ads.

earthboundkid 5y ago

Frame I have used on HN many times: Many people have a favorite TV ads. People watch the Super Bowl for the ads. People sing radio jingles to themselves. College kids put nice magazine ads on their dorm walls. People pay money for clothes with logos that are essentially just ads for themselves. People watch videos of influencers unboxing/using/reviewing products they are paid to unbox/use/review. Etc. People love all kinds of ads. No one likes banner ads. It is failed ad format and should be replaced. No one likes direct targeting. It should be made illegal. There are lots of other ad formats and methods that work great. Those two are the problem.

the_snooze 5y ago
People like well-made thoughtful creative ads. Algorithmic targeting misses the point completely. It's the human element that doesn't scale that's valuable.

wpietri 5y ago

I agree that's one problem. But even without stalking as a business model, the point of ads is mostly to manipulate people into buying things with little regard as to utility. Look, for example, at large advertisers like Coca Cola. Coke spends ~$1 billion/year in the US alone on ads. That's not because nobody has heard of them. The point is to shift money into Coke's pockets. Almost all advertising provides no net benefit to society; it's just an arms race between companies competing to manipulate people. If we banned it, we'd quickly find other ways to get people the minimal information content it contains. We'd definitely find ways to spend the $1tn or so that it consumes now. And that's not even counting the benefits from less waste and market distortion caused by advertising.