zlacker

>>smnrg+(OP)
Sao Paulo, Brazil, made outdoor advertising illegal. That worked out quite well.

The US used to forbid prescription drug advertising. That seemed to work.

Ads for liquor, marijuana, and gambling are prohibited in many jurisdictions.

The FCC once limited the number of minutes of ads per hour on the public airwaves. That limit was below 10% of air time in the 1960s.

The SEC used to limit ads for financial products to dull "tombstone" ads, which appeared mostly in the Wall Street Journal.

A useful restriction might be to make advertising non tax deductible as a business expense. That encourages putting value into cost of goods sold rather than marketing.

>>Animat+le
Making advertising non tax deductible has the effect of making it marketing ~20% more expensive, which would lead to about 20% less marketing. But not really. It doesn't really cost YouTube anything to play an add, so YouTube ads get 20% cheaper, and you see the same amount of ads.

Also this would be hard to implement. Tax law has a hard time discriminating costs. What if all the marketing is done by an Irish subsidiary?