The courts already distinguish "commercial speech" as a class of speech. Would we prevent all forms of commercial speech? What about a waiter asking you "would you like to try a rosé with that dish? It pairs very well together." Is that "advertising" that would need to be outlawed?
What about giving out free samples? Is that advertising, and thus should be illegal?
What about putting a sign up on your business that says the business name? Is that advertising?
I hate advertising and propaganda. But the hard part IMO is drawing the line. Where's the line?
The line is clear: is money being exchanged in order to promote a product? That's advertising.
Someone I know mentioning a product because they want to recommend it to me? Not advertising.
Giving out "free" samples? Presumably someone is being paid to do that, so advertising.
We can later quibble about edge cases and how to handle someone putting up a sign for their business. Many countries have regulations about visual noise, so that should be considered as well.
But it's pretty easy to distinguish advertising that seeks to manipulate, and putting a stop to that. Hell, we could start by surfacing the dark data broker market and banning it altogether. That alone should remove the most egregious cases of privacy abuse.
Let's consider toomim's three examples: "would you like to try a rosé with that dish? It pairs very well together," giving out free samples, and putting a sign up on your business that says the business name.
The first case seems like it would straightforwardly be illegal under your proposal if the waiter is an employee (or contractor) who gets paid by the restaurant, because the restaurant is exchanging money with the waiter in order to promote the rosé, which is a product. It would only be legal if the waiter were an unpaid volunteer or owned the restaurant.
The second case seems like it would straightforwardly be illegal under your proposal if the business had to buy the free samples from somewhere, knowing that it would give some of them out as free samples, because then it's exchanging money with its supplier in order to promote its products (in some cases the same product, but in other cases the bananas and soft drinks next to the cash registers, which people are likely to buy if you can get them into the store). Also, if one of the business's employees (or a contractor) gave out the free samples, that would be exchanging money with the employee to promote a product. You'd only be in the clear if you're a sole proprietor or partnership who bought the products without intending to give them away, changed your mind later, and then gave them away yourself rather than paying an employee to do so.
Putting up a sign on the business that says the business name is clearly promoting products, if the business sells products. Obviously the business can't pay a sign shop. If the business owner makes the sign herself, that might be legal, but not if she buys materials to make the sign from. She'd have to make the sign from materials unintentionally left over from legitimate non-advertising purchases, or which she obtained by non-purchase means, such as fishing them out of the garbage. However, she'd be in the clear if her business only sells services, not products.
A large blanket loophole in the law as you proposed it is that it completely exempts barter. So you can still buy a promotional sign from the sign shop if you pay the sign shop with something other than money, such as microwave ovens. The sign shop can then freely sell the microwave ovens for money.
In this form, it seems like your proposal would put at risk basically any purchase of goods by a product-selling business, except for barter, because there is a risk that those goods would be used for premeditated product promotion. Probably in practice businesses would keep using cash, which would give local authorities free rein to shut down any business they didn't like, while overlooking the criminal product-promotion conspiracies of their friends.
So, do you want to propose some legal language that is somewhat more narrowly tailored? Because a discussion entirely based on "I know it when I see it" vibes is completely worthless; everyone's vibes are different.
That said, after thinking about it for a few more minutes, I can think of one simple addendum to my initial criteria. I wrote about it here[1], so I won't repeat myself.
It's asinine that this discussion is taken to extreme ends. We don't need to ban all forms of advertising and get into endless discussions about semantics and free speech in order to stop the abuse of the current system. There is surely a middle ground that does it in a sensible way. The only reason we don't fix this is because the powers that be have no incentives to do so, and the general population is conditioned and literally brainwashed to not care about it.
[1]: >>43599948
If you can't figure out how to express what you want in such a way that it doesn't immediately collapse upon the most casual attempt at critical thought, the problem probably isn't that the population is brainwashed. It's probably that what you want is to eat your cake and still have it, a logical contradiction that could never exist in any possible world.
You seem to think that the law is something that can be delegated to the lawyers. But in fact the law balances conflicting interests. If you don't participate in defining it, your interests won't be taken into account. A law written by lawyers without outside input will only serve the lawyers' interests, not yours.
If you can't see how the current system is harming not just individuals, but the stability of governments and our democratic processes, and the role of the advertising industry in all of this, then nothing I nor anyone else says can convince you otherwise.
You seem more interested in scrutinizing hastily put together arguments by laypeople on an internet forum, than acknowledging the issues put forth, and the fact that fixing this deeply rooted problem will require multi-faceted solutions over a very long period of time.
And for that reason, I'm out.