My working theory is, that advertising is the overhead cost of doing capitalism. There is a certain percentage of resources which have to be spent on advertising to keep the system functioning. Google is good at grabbing a large portion of a huge pile of money.
Not really. It's sufficient to show cool products in "TV" shows (robotic vacuum cleaner in a procedural crime drama might even be a plot device, absorbing murderer's hair to be found by detectives, gasp!).
Coupled with a magazine or a show presenting new product categories for those interested, customers will eventually visit a physical or online shop and check out the goods. And then word of mouth will do the rest.
Aggressive advertising will mostly just help you get ahead of your competitors and perhaps speed up the adoption rate at the cost of increased volatility of the market and to the detriment of people's mental health.
We would be better off regulating aggressive ads away.
> Aggressive advertising will mostly just help you get ahead of your competitors
That's a hell of a load-bearing "just" you managed to insert there. Getting ahead of your competitors in market share can be the difference between having a company succeed or fail.
So if nobody is "getting ahead of competitors", does it mean that "capitalism is not functioning"? (which was the point of the comment to which the reply was)
Product placement is still advertising, likewise advertising plays a role in getting people to go to that online or brick and mortar shop instead of some other one.
I propose a law: nobody can advertise a product without mentioning all the brands which offer same or similar product on the market (and the mention must be neutral or positive).
Or: all advertisers of all brands with a same or similar product must collaborate. Only voluntary input counts as collaboration; if a brand simply doesn't care about presentation of itself in the advertisement, they have trivially collaborated. Easiest way to implement this is giving every owner of all relevant brands a right to veto every entire final advertisement product (this right could also be surrendered, for all or some possible vetoed advertisements, in exchange for something in a contract).
Ignoring flaws of this proposition itself, what could be society's reasons for rejecting it? Does society perhaps want havers of more money to gain further advantage over havers of less money?
>nobody can advertise a product without mentioning all the brands which offer same or similar product on the marke
Maybe 50 years ago that would have worked. Today, not so much. Go to Amazon and look, well, just about anything. What is BEHENO, what is DINGEE, what is Etoolia, what is Romedia, what are the over 300 different 6/7 letter companies that show up when I search up some random product.
Unfortunately your consideration causes its own parasite effect of countless companies forming up to feed of the big advertisers budget.
Since the product is standard, why is it actually bad? If there are too many brands to be included in a single advert, just choose randomly (the lower the price, the higher the probability for a single brand; I don't know the function).
Because, in the US, this will quickly fall foul of free speech laws. Over 'public' airwaves maybe you could go some distance with this, but advertising on private property, as long as it is not fraudulent will present a constitutional challenge to what your saying.
And, you're also crating a regulatory nightmare. Say I put up an add for XXYZXX company, and it includes ZZXYZZ and YYXZYY information (I mean totally random picks), and I just happen to have a stake in those companies too. Now you're going to have to track hundreds of thousands of these entities to ensure no fraud is occurring, and in most cases the fines for this kind of behavior are well under the cost of doing business.
Everything you've said so far just creates bigger messes and solves nothing.
It solves a hypothetical skew towards brands offered by already richer businesses.
About regulation, how hard is it to just audit the random picking procedure?
I now understand that my second variant, with vetoing of final advertisement, is very flawed (one can cheaply obstruct anyone's advertisement by making a company that vetoes any version of it). How about dividing an advertisement into pieces of information solely about each distinct brand, and let every brand owner compose the piece for its brand? Then all pieces are added into final concrete form in a collaboration - I think it would succeed in most cases, and if brand owners can't collaborate, then an independent company will work on it.
Then we need to look how exactly freedom of speech is defined. If it means ability to express views without attaching any additional information, then such freedom is incompatible with my proposal. But if freedom of speech allows attaching additional information as long as base message is preserved, I see no problems. Note that the proposal essentially just forces you to advertise other brands as they wish, along with any advertisement that you do, which (brands) it doesn't mention.
