Presumably we want to keep paid actors, but then the loop hole is that Procter & Gamble becomes a media production company.
That's actually close to how things used to be eg in the US.
I'm all for banning whole forms of advertisements (ex. Billboards) that don't actually educate the consumer about the product. But _all_ advertisements is too knee-jerk.
Bribery laws, SEC insider trading/collusion stuff...there's many existing examples for definitions for that, when the law doesn't want something to be for sale.
So, in the case of a billboard, if you are paying a landlord, that's advertising. If you are paying a newspaper to print a specific article, that's also advertising. This means paid press releases are also not allowed. Product placement would fall under this definition too - if a specific car brand is paying you to feature their cars in a movie, that's advertising.
Notably, it's not advertising if no payment is being made. If you are making a movie and you decide to feature a specific car brand - and you aren't getting any kickbacks for it - that's completely allowed.
It's also not advertising if it's first-party. For example, a sign that's advertising a restaurant is allowed if the actual restaurant itself is underneath that sign. And it's also not advertising if Disney is pushing Disney movies and products at Disney World, because Disney owns the full creative rights to Disney World and they aren't being paid by outsiders to adjust the messaging.
This definition can even be robust to grey areas like "what if a car brand makes a movie featuring their cars?" - well, how is that movie being distributed? Are they paying people to distribute the movie, or is it genuinely a good movie that people are distributing on their own? Paying people to distribute the movie is not allowed, but if the movie is good enough that people are distributing it anyway of their own volition, then it's okay!
Overall, the definition is pretty large, and paid promotion is so deeply ingrained into modern society that it's difficult to imagine exactly how much would change if advertising was banned. But, quite a lot would change! Pretty much the entire playbook for all commercial enterprises for "how to tell the world about your thing" would have to be re-written, and new institutions would have to be developed to replace advertising.
But I think society overall would benefit greatly from the change!
Paid actors, and for example company representatives, do count as acting on behalf of the company and therefore don't count as paid advertising. But, whatever medium they are talking to has to be an unpaid medium. A company representative (or paid actor) talking about a product in an interview is okay if the interviewer / distributor is not being paid to host the interview. (or if the interviewer / distributor is the company itself - that's also allowed).
Does that give massive companies an advantage? I would argue not really, because it creates massive overheads for pushing advertisement content, and since you aren't allowed to pay for distribution, it means that people have to be interesting in consuming your content of their own volition instead of other content that isn't trying to push products.
> Let’s see if we can define this
1: a public notice
*especially* : a paid notice that is published or broadcast (as to attract customers or to provide information of public interest)
3: something resembling an advertisement (as in alerting someone to something)
I think a better way to answer this is define what kind of advertisements we want to ban. In that respect, I think this has a clearer definition than the previous HN post[1]. The definition of a billboard is much less ambiguous.
But let's not stop, let's continue the actual conversation. I think the problem with the earlier thread is that many conversations boiled down to dichotomies rather than the reality that there is a continuum of what is considered advertising. Personally, I have absolutely no issues with stores having signs in their windows or those wacky inflatable arm guys. Let's call this "old school advertising" for lack of better words.
But I want to add some context for anyone that is confused by people who are angry at ads. People that are upset with ads (myself included) are in generally upset about Surveillance Capitalism[2]. The thing is that ads have gotten out of control. I mean let's be real, the companies with the #5 and #7 market cap (Google @ ~1.8T and Meta @ ~1.3T) are both almost entirely driven by advertising. This does not sound like a healthy economy to me! Some of the richest companies in the world make more money convincing people to buy things rather than actually producing things. There's a lot of ways to define value, are we sure we want to base an economy where we define it this way? Where companies are extremely incentivized to persuade/manipulate people into buying things or thinking certain ways. Is this really what we want to be putting all the efforts of humanity into? Convincing people to buy shit? (or vote a certain way? Or think a certain way?) Do you think that is better than if we had larger concentrated efforts into other things? We said value is a vague word, right? So who creates more value: the person manufacturing a car or a quant trader on Wall-street? How about the person developing a search engine or the person developing better target advertising? Who is providing more value? How about with a different definition of value?
Regardless of how much you think a person or a public is able to be manipulated, surely you can agree that these are perverse incentives. This can help us circle back to my earlier point: do you think it should be acceptable to manipulate children? Certainly to some degree it is acceptable, right? We want to convince them to go to school and better themselves. But should we allow trillion dollar companies to persuade them to buy things? Certainly these are not fully developed humans who have the same constitutional resilience as a grown adult such as you or I, right? Now we can take that even further: what does it mean to advertise to kids? Are billboards? Surely they see them simply by living in the world. What about general audience TV? Surely they'd see those by watching TV.
Fundamentally, the root of the question is "in what directions do we want to be pushing humanity?" There's a lot of economic levels you can pull long before you get anywhere near what would be considered a Planned Economy[3,4].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
[1] >>43595269
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy
[4] If you really think pulling any levers is equivalent then it would necessitate you also believing in the abolishment of all governments and all organizations of any kind. A rather ridiculous bar, but I want to make sure we don't degrade into pretending this is a black and white issue. There's a large continuum here and any effort to incentivize one direction over another is not the same as having absolute rule.
Section 1. Ban on Commercial Advertisements All commercial advertisements, in any medium, are hereby prohibited throughout the United States.
Section 2. Definition For purposes of this Act, “commercial advertisement” means any paid or otherwise sponsored message intended to promote the sale or use of goods, services, or commercial ventures.
Section 3. Enforcement and Penalties Violations of this Act shall be subject to civil or criminal penalties as determined by the courts.
The thing is going to hit the courts anyways. Just craft it in a way that hits the Pareto curve on effectiveness vs legality.
Is it ok that when you're watching broadcast/network TV, they advertise internet or cellular service, because the conglomerate that owns the TV station also owns an ISP and cell carrier?
Is it ok if you're using a popular web search engine, and they advertise their own hosted business productivity suite?
I think no, we should not allow these things. But no money (or consideration, or whatever) has exchanged hands here.
What is this place? What do they sell here? Wait, is this just a house? ... it would bring some mystery and excitement to shopping.
I think you have to specify that the payment goes to the owner of the platform - where platform is a very broad concept.
How about health ad ("Smoking kills") ?
How about mentioning a product in health ad (Smoking kills. Nicotine patches help you quit smoking)?
Traditionally, the government setup some regulatory body to oversee these kind of exemptions. These body often corrupt over time. Is a corrupted regulatory body better than no exemptions allowed?
Do we want the legal text cover all cases and become so dense that nobody can comprehend? Or do we want some simple rules and live with the possible unintended consequences?
and the most important question : People hate changes and some industries need to rethink their own business. How could we get people agrees on this in a democratic setting?
I think that similar exceptions extend to a TV network that's pushing its own products at you while you are watching the station. No consideration has been provided to push the ad, so you are in whatever ecosystem.
How do you know when you've crossed the line into abuse? Well, we have anti-monopoly laws for that. At some point an ecosystem becomes so big it's a monopoly that needs to be broken up, and after it gets broken up it can't self-deal across the broken pieces anymore. So just like we already have good legal infrastructure in place for figuring out when "consideration" has happened, we also have good (well, maybe not good enough lately) legal infrastructure in place for figuring out when a company is too big and too able to self-deal.
So if I pay somebody independent to hand out leaflets, that's advertising. But if I employ somebody in the position of leafleteer, now it doesn't count.
I'm a bit confused.
When Amazon pays the postal service to send me a book, is that paid distribution and thus advertising?
Another example: I used to subscribe to the print edition of the Economist. I as a consumer paid for that product. Does that mean there's no ads in the Economist? (A substantial fraction of the print edition is made up of ads in the common sense understanding of the term.)