I've been thinking a lot about advertising lately and I agree with the post about the right not to see advertising. Advertising has gotten out of hand and these days there really is no easy way that people can chose not to see advertising - and that's the "problem" with advertising, it's unsolicited.
Advertising is not in itself bad, it does supply consumers with information about goods and services that are available for purchase and this is not a trivial thing, just imagine a world completely lacking advertising and you will realise that with todays enourmous markets it would take a lot of time to find out where to get the things you need (or crave). True, that it might have the effect that we didn't crave as many things and that there simply would be less goods and services to buy (and if that is good or bad is a completely different topic), but it would also make it hard and time-consuming for the consumers to inform themselves about the things they want to consume. Where can I get it? How much will it cost? What are the differences between these two similar goods?
So, a shift towards solicited rather than unsolicited might be the way to go. As a consumer I could then sign up for various advertising services, but to be sure those advertising services would only advertise stuff that I am actually interested in, and only advertise it in a more informative way than most advertising does today. Other people would chose other advertising services more geared towards their preferences. Most companies would hate it if we moved in that direction, but as I said I don't think that it would mean they couldn't advertise, because advertising fulfills a function for the consumer as well as the company, it would just limit the advertising to different channels.
I don't really think this is realistic at the moment, and the trend is certainly going in the opposite direction as this article shows. There are small glimmers of hope though, like the ads in Google that does sort of indirectly check your preferences by what you search for - but it's still lacking in the choice department.
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I've been thinking a lot about advertising lately and I agree with the post about the right not to see advertising. Advertising has gotten out of hand and these days there really is no easy way that people can chose not to see advertising - and that's the "problem" with advertising, it's unsolicited. Advertising is not in itself bad, it does supply consumers with information about goods and services that are available for purchase and this is not a trivial thing, just imagine a world completely lacking advertising and you will realise that with todays enourmous markets it would take a lot of time to find out where to get the things you need (or crave). True, that it might have the effect that we didn't crave as many things and that there simply would be less goods and services to buy (and if that is good or bad is a completely different topic), but it would also make it hard and time-consuming for the consumers to inform themselves about the things they want to consume. Where can I get it? How much will it cost? What are the differences between these two similar goods? So, a shift towards solicited rather than unsolicited might be the way to go. As a consumer I could then sign up for various advertising services, but to be sure those advertising services would only advertise stuff that I am actually interested in, and only advertise it in a more informative way than most advertising does today. Other people would chose other advertising services more geared towards their preferences. Most companies would hate it if we moved in that direction, but as I said I don't think that it would mean they couldn't advertise, because advertising fulfills a function for the consumer as well as the company, it would just limit the advertising to different channels. I don't really think this is realistic at the moment, and the trend is certainly going in the opposite direction as this article shows. There are small glimmers of hope though, like the ads in Google that does sort of indirectly check your preferences by what you search for - but it's still lacking in the choice department.