Let’s put an end to advertising!
It’s time we realize the absurdity and consequences connected with advertising. The absurdity is the enormous consumption that never would have taken place if the ads didn’t influence the consumer. The consequences are cities littered with ads, people feeling bad about themselves because they don’t look like the photo-shopped people in the ads, and worst of all, it’s driving environmental destruction. I don’t understand; how is this legal anywhere?
I guess advertising started out as a way to help people find what they were looking for. I can imagine it started with simple shop signs in ancient Rome or something like that, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that, what once started as visibility of your shop, telling you where you could get that bread you would buy anyway, has slowly turned into something very different. It is now a business in itself, a business who’s purpose is to drive consumption to earn more money, consumption that never would have taken place if it wasn’t for the ads. With the internet it all accelerated further. Giant companies now run their operations mostly based on income from ads, and they earn enormous amounts of money.
In the beginning of the ad based internet, I thought it was really cool. I could have services like Gmail, Facebook, Hotmail, Yahoo and so on for free. They’re all doing the same thing, but let me use Google as an example here. Google created extremely good web based software, and it was mostly free to use. The software they created was exactly what I was looking for at the time. I still use it, your email-address is the ultimate vendor lock-in, but I have a long term plan to find an alternatives, like posteo.de. The only catch was it being ad supported, but I was thinking that I wouldn’t buy any of that stuff anyway, so that was OK. What puzzled me in the beginning though, was that Google’s own products almost didn’t contain any ads at all, like Google Docs. I knew they earned basically all their money at the time from ads, but why wouldn’t they have ads in their own services to make even more money? Took me some years to realize that the information I provided to Google by using their services, was used to “improve” the advertising shown to me on other web sites. The same goes for most of the other ad driven companies as well. This is as you know already, an important privacy issue. But still, privacy issues are to me the least concerning part of advertising. Other consequences of ads are much more concerning to me.
Here’s a list of the negative consequences coming from ads that I could come to think of:
- Increased pollution from increased consumption. Increased consumption leads to more production, more production leads to the use of more natural resources, more commuting of workers, more transport of goods, and so on.
- People feeling depressed and having low self esteem because their life, things and looks can’t compare with the fake crap they see in ads everywhere.
- Privacy issues from using services that’s using your information to target ads.
- Cities, roads, buses, taxies, bus stops, walls, web pages, all littered with ads. It makes life uglier.
- All the extra paper produced for ad pages in newspapers, magazines, ads delivered in your mail and so on. We have killed entire forests only to show some ads!
- People spending their money on shit they don’t need because the ads worked. Money they could have spent on a real service, like subscribing to an independent news service or a doctor.
- Gambling issues, there’s so many ads for gambling services online, it makes me sick.
- Tourism! I don’t have the numbers here, but I guess people would be traveling much less if there wasn’t a constant push from ads telling you that the good life needs to involve a lot of traveling and flying. People need to travel every now and then to get inspiration and find themselves, but the constant flying around the world and looking at things, that’s just silly.
And so on. By allowing all these ads, we’re allowing all these issues to grow and get worse. Recently there’s been a much needed debate around ad based online services and privacy, but if the privacy issues requires a debate, then the other consequences require so much more. I’m tempted to use the revolution-word here, but I will refrain from that.
Some of you might argue that companies need to be able to tell about their services, and that it’s helping people find the products they need. Well sorry, but you’re just simply plain wrong. You don’t need advertising anywhere near what you have today for healthy businesses to run. When people need something, they will look for it, and all you need at that point is a service like yellow pages. You don’t need a constant noise around you telling you about every product you can imagine for companies to survive. You need a neutral service where people can look for the service or product they need, and then choose a supplier. Companies delivering products and services people actually need will survive just fine, they will get all the money people spend, the other companies will go bankrupt. And that’s a good thing.
Let’s dream of a world where people who supplies what people actually want and need earns all the money. A world where people go to work and make a living because they deliver something useful, living a meaningful life. Where ads are nowhere to see, but instead you have great services where you can find the supplier of the things you need listed. Where pollution is cut in half, because driving consumption is no longer the point. Where Facebook didn’t have to be free, because if you needed a social network, you would gladly pay for it. You could also afford it, because you didn’t buy all that stuff you didn’t need.
What do you think? Do you agree? Any ideas what we can go about to end advertising? How do we start?
