If ads were merely about being informative, they would be boring. But ads want to manipulate, so they have to be flashy and appeal to your emotions.
They pollute your mental headspace, and have no place in a healthy society.
Let's ban billboards. And then let's follow that up with a general purpose ban on paid advertisement.
Essentially, to get the word out about your organization or product (whether for-profit or non-profit), you'd have to convince someone with an audience to feature you *without paying them to do it*. In other words, your organization or product or service has to be genuinely interesting on its own.
And, since nobody else is allowed to pay for people's attention, you aren't competing with budgets, you are competing with other ideas. Imho this makes for a much more interesting information landscape.
It takes time and effort to feature a product, how could they make a living?
I can imagine 4 different possible outcomes:
- People just find new loophole and behave exactly as before
- Large media company only features products from their friends and families. Monopoly.
- Only the government and a few selected individuals get the incentive. They gain from controlling the information.
- Only local businesses can survive.
They are very different outcome. You can't just ban one undesirable behaviour and hope for the best. You need to focus on what outcome you desire and how each and every side effects.
-- While we are banning monetary gain for ad, can we stop political lobbying too?
That's exactly the point. People shouldn't be making a living promoting other people's products. If they like something and want to promote it, for no compensation, then they should.
Imagine someone with a home improvement YouTube channel. They really, genuinely like certain brands for the tools that they use. So those tools will be visible in the videos, and the person making the videos is free to tell viewers how much they like those brands.