Tiered pricing is EVERYWHERE now. In supermarkets, if you don’t have their app/loyalty card you have to pay higher prices. They frame it as a “discount” or “savings” for having the app, but clearly it’s just a punishment for not giving them your info and allowing them to track/advertise at you.
In restaurants/fast food places, you get “discounts” (i.e. regular prices) via the app/email list, and if you don’t have the app or give them your email address you don’t get the discount (read: you have to pay higher prices). And of course they can “tailor” personalised “deals” directly at you based on your past behaviour to optimise how much money they get out of you.
I just looked at a hotel and they’re advertising a “discount” if you give them your email address (read: a higher price if you don’t allow them to advertise at you).
I absolutely hate this behaviour. I know exactly why it’s there: some people are willing to pay more for convenience/no ads, and some are willing to go to more effort / put up with ads for a lower price. Either way they get more money out of you: the logical conclusion of capitalism and chasing higher profits.
It feels like this should be illegal. It feels like a cousin of price gouging, which is already illegal. Ofc it never will be outlawed in america - idk how much this happens across the pond though - but I hope one day this could be outlawed in europe.
What is advertising then? When a company explains the benefit of its own product? A link to a particular product or service? Would word of mouth among consumers be a form of advertising? If not, then why not companies showing a word of mouth for other (affiliated) companies? What is the distinction between a company and the owner in the case of a sole proprietorship?
My point is, if this wasn’t obvious enough, there are so many obvious problems and loop holes with this approach, you should give it a think for 20 minutes and then start saying something else.
The best working definition I have come up with is banning ‘one party giving payment, in the form of money, goods, and/or services, to a second party in exchange for the display of media to a third party, in specific or in general, who did not explicitly request to be shown that media.’ This would cover the vast majority of problematic advertising. And it’s absurd to pretend it has to be ‘done in one.’ If more laws need to be made to counter loopholes because the sociopaths in the marketing department refuse to get real jobs, more laws can be made until companies’ decision-makers realise how much the marketing department is costing them in fees and implementation relative to the imperceptible benefit of having them.
Companies can still use their own spaces to display relevant product information. (i.e. factual, specific information on products that are present and being offered at the location of the informational media)
Word of mouth, if not caused by coercion or compensation, is not disingenuous, so not a problem. If you really love Brand X so much that you want to let everyone know about it when you talk to them, great. That means it’s such a genuinely good product that you feel love for it. That’d essentially be the goal. If they have to pay you to praise it, it’s not a good product.
Corporate personhood also needs to go, so no difference should be recognized between what a company does and what its proprietor does. The owner should not ask/allow their representatives to do things in their name for which they do not wish to be held responsible.
As for ‘…companies showing a word of mouth…’ That’s going to need rephrasing.
Trust me. I haven’t been just spouting off about how harmful advertising is without thinking about it. I already know it will make starting new small businesses harder, and I have considered loosening the rule to only apply to businesses with positive cashflow AND/OR with revenues over <some number, maybe 10>x the median wage. That would allow small business owners to have some leeway during their early days and scale with inflation/economic changes.
Other than that, I’ve never heard any remotely sensible arguments against it. Advertising is like nuclear weapons. It pollutes the (information) environment around it and distorts people’s behaviour in all sorts of ways, and companies only need to have it because other companies have it. As seen with american tobacco companies when their ads were banned, it lowers expenses and people who want the product still buy the product. It’s a net benefit for everyone except for marketing firms, but so what? We didn’t keep putting lead in the gasoline just to keep the jobs in the lead mining industry.
Require consent for advertising.
If I seek out information on your product or service then give it to me, sure. Otherwise fuck off forever out of my life, my internet, my art, my public spaces, my media, and everything else that you’ve ruined.
Now that that’s banned there’s much less reason for disgusting shit. My friend had a baby recently and the daycares consent demands the right to share data collected for marketing and market research purposes. This cannot be opted out of and is required to enroll, and there’s also this really gross thing where they do a separate photo consent form that implies that photos won’t be shared but when you read all the consents more thoroughly (there are several) you find that they retain all data including photos in perpetuity and it falls under the category that allows marketing and market research usage if they so choose. For children that are not even 1 year old!
This is a bigger issue on private equity owning care facilities (a whole other thing) but the fact of the matter is that advertisers have 0 ethics and will do whatever they want to whoever they want. They don’t care about consent because it’s an industry run by sociopaths with the mindset of rapists. They will destroy your product or service if you let them in and take their blood money. Once they’re in they will demand more and more until your product is shaped around advertising, either display or data collection to improve targeting for ad spend efficacy. They don’t care if it’s children, if it’s the elderly, the disabled, the extremely poor, etc. anyone can be sold to and anything can be sold. Let’s make some money. Fuck them, ban their industry, burn it down. If you work in advertising you are a piece of shit and the world is worse because you exist. You made bad choices and everyone is disappointed in you. Destroy the industry from within if you can, change careers, or die a piece of shit scumbag
How did you find out about the day care? Again, you “idea” is only quarter-baked at best. Your plan is to have me sign a consent form every time I enter a store with custom labels on the objects?
Seriously, fuck off with this nonsensical shit so the rest of us can focus on actual solutions. Because right now, all you are doing is wasting the bandwidth of your ISP, and everyone who has to mentally filter out your comment.
They asked me to look over the policy with them, which I did.
When you enter a store you are tacitly consenting to see products, obviously. What purpose does a store hold otherwise? But the walls don’t need to be plastered with advertisements for you to figure out that cereal is available to purchase.
Similarly in the point of a service like the daycare: if I look this up I am consenting. A service having a webpage isn’t an inherent problem. But when they can encroach on other actions that is breaching consent. When they can appear in unrelated web searches, in related websearches but priority ranking that’s not necessarily warranted, on unrelated or tangentially related websites, on walls in unrelated or tangentially related stores, as videos before unrelated or tangentially videos, etc. now they are the digital equivalent of litter. When they are in a newspaper, the unsolicited junk mail that keeps usps alive, etc they’re actual litter.
A directory is not the same as advertisement. It’s utilitarian and does not destroy everything it touches. But your shitty ad brain can’t conceptualize how this could ever work. You probably work for some company that does advertising bullshit and need to justify keeping some form of modern the unethical modern advertising machine around
Not ad brain, just a brain.
Notice all the little “Well, obviously not those ads” and implied consent scattered throughout your explanation? Did you even consider how much that would entrench current businesses if smaller companies couldn’t advertise? Or how that would proliferate enshittifying conglomerates that can package their products under a blanket consent form, locking out advertisements from competitors? How would this work for traditional advertisements like flyers, radio broadcasts, and billboards? If you banned those outright, all that remains is online advertisements, and if you think big tech has an entrenchment advantage now? Just wait until media platforms and ISPs are the gatekeepers of the most effective means of reaching customers and growing their business.
Lastly, do you have any conception of how much advertising subsidizes modern society? Think of everything from little leagues (which use corporate sponsors to pay for equipment and referees) to social media including lemmy! Every instance I know of includes an advertisement somewhere asking for donations to either support lemmy developers, or cover server cost. You could make them all paid services, but now you’ve locked out poor people from participating. Organizations could hide all functionality behind a consent form to show advertisements to subsidize cost, but then there is just a formality checkbox you must click before using any free online web service - solving exactly none of the actual issues around malware delivery, intrusive data collection, poor resource management, or even the most basic problem of advertisements being annoying.
I’m done here. Start thinking, and until then, stop wasting bytes and oxygen.