You're kidding right? Everything you listed is being done with because of a motive where they stand to gain somehow. They are not providing a public service. While the definition of advertisement does include "just telling someone something", in practise in the real world, advertisements exist because someone has motive to make them because they stand to gain from doing so, where as "just telling someone something" is never called an advertisement it's called an announcement or a broadcast.
> - Asking customer to place yard signs on their property
They don't ask the customer to do so out of the kindness of their hearts, they offer a discount on the bill for doing so. Another way to look at that same situation, is, extortion - "run our ad on your lawn for a month or you'll pay more for this work"... And, the discount compared to the length of time they get an ad spot on someone's lawn is probably very much in the favor of the company. Charging someone more money unless they advertise your business, not out of satisfaction, but because the other option is to pay more, isn't very ethical to me, as the customer basically is given a choice that isn't a choice unless they want to knowingly spend more money for nothing.
> - Small businesses putting physical ads in other small businesses
They share ads between each other to try to leach of off each others customers. Maybe even closer to "participate in our shared cartel or we'll send folks to some competitor who does.". Either way, it's not being done to inform folks of something, it's being done to profit and these users are already out, spending money, and close by, so it's the cheapest costing acquisition funnel.
> - Printing shirts, hats, pop sockets, etc. . . and handing them out for free
That merch given out is paid for by the company's marketing budget and that's because what they are buying is ad space with potentially unlimited and extremely cheap display time. You see a nice company giving you a shirt for free. What they see is a sucker who is happy to become a walking billboard that will go to packed concerts, bars, tv shows, friend groups, etc for the price of a cheap t shirt and silk screen, for the life of the tshirt, gaining brand recognition if nothing else the entire time. Manipulating a person into thinking the free shirt they were given is ethical advertising when they are actually being used to freely advertise their brand, not something I'd consider ethical.
> - sponsoring local events/athletes/scholars
All done to get a giant banner on the fence of the field, have your branding stamped on every helmet, bike, bat, glove, shirt, said in every annoucement, etc. They aren't "sponsoring" those things, they are paying for advertising space, and saying it's not that isn't very ethical. They aren't doing anything for the good of the community, they are doing it for mindshare. Redbull on every extreme sport for instance.
> - Parade floats, community bulletein boards, festival/event booths
Parade floats are so the company gets a mention or airtime or mindshare as it passes by people. Festivals and event booths, please see my free tshirt reply. That booth they purchased or conference they sponsored is advertising budget and used to push their product on attendees.
- wrapping company vehicles
> I used to do fleet vehicles for corporations. Company branding applied to company fleets is not advertising. It's so when those service vehicles arrive to a customer, they are recognizable by those expecting them (UPS, FedEX, DHL, Geek Squad, etc). They inevitably get used to advertise, because of course they do, but the only thing they can do is steal mindshare and force through repeat exposure a bias for the company just because you see their name more often. It's manipulation, and hardly ethical.
I'm not going to reply to example after example. No matter the application, no matter they given benifets or percieved value you think they are giving, the end result is for you to give them money, and the fact that so many forms of ads exist that people don't see as exactly that, companies talking you out of your money or otherwise using you to make money (walking billboard), shows that it's not possible to be ethical advertising. Ethical advertising is build a good product, let it speak for itself by being a good product, and let happy customers spread word when they want to, if they want to, and for no other reason than because of the product they are impressed with. If you're not selling garbage, or shit people don't need, you shouldn't have to spend money to manipulate people into thinking they need it.
Although, the sharing of useful information is different than an advertisement, entirely, so such a thing wouldn't be called an ad.
Wikipedia exists to share information and inform us of something we might find useful. It doesn't need to be pushed on anyone. It just needs to exist in the open.
Anytime something is brought to you that you didn't ask for, demanding your attention, there is motive behind why it's being done, be it a coworker pitching a tool to you trying to get buy-in and force a decision they want to be made in their favor, a flyer of sales happening at the grocery store that's delivered to your door on Sunday, or the blinking square ad impression telling you that if you just give up some of your money, they will provide you with a service that will make you feel like you're making progress on something (and then you'll convince yourself that's true even if it's not because nobody likes to admit they made a mistake and wasted time and/or money).
Ads are forced upon us, telling us something, and there is so much motive behind why it's being done, people will spend millions to make sure you see it. Even if it's just a tidbit of info, selling no product, whoever is motivated enough to pay a lot of money for you to see it, has motive to push an agenda which you seeing that info stands to benifet from. It's still manipulation. It's not possible to be ethical.
The only example of real world ethical advertising I can think of, would be the million dollar webpage. A webpage of pixels purchased to show an ad, that you have to willingly make the decision to navigate to and look at, and that website no longer exists, which proves my point pretty well imo
I agree with you on the large scale, but once I zoom in, my thoughts get murkier. I can't think of any ethical digital advertising, but have a harder time condemning all advertising. How would you evaluate these kind of ads:
- Asking customer to place yard signs on their property
- Small businesses putting physical ads in other small businesses
- Printing shirts, hats, pop sockets, etc. . . and handing them out for free
- sponsoring local events/athletes/scholars
- Parade floats, community bulletein boards, festival/event booths
- wrapping company vehicles
I guess, after typing out this list, none of this is targeted advertising; maybe that's what separates them in my mind.
The usual excuse for advertising being morally acceptable is that it informs potential customers about the product. If it has nothing to do with the product then its only possible purpose is deception.
It isn't. Marketing and advertising in particular is about making people buy the product that the company paying for the advertising wants to sell. It uses lies and emotional manipulation to make people think that they need that product. Helping customers fulfill their needs and wants is not helpful when these needs and wants would not even exist without ads.
This is particularly obvious for ads for stuff like coke: Everyone knows coke exists. Ads for it do not inform at all, they only manipulate.
If ads were useful to the customer, then there would be no need to embed them with useful services, let alone to force customers to expose themselves to them by turning of their ad blockers. It would not make sense to give customers a choice between paying for a given service or suffering from ads: Those are signs that the value of ads for customers is negative. If it were positive, you could even charge extra for them.
Despite being a very bad method of informing customers, ads might be defensible if they were the only one. But they aren't. Classifieds may technically be ads, but they differ fundamentally from others in that customers specifically seek them out. That indicates that customers do get value from them.
Another suitable method of informing customers are newspapers and magazines, especially specialized magazines and ones like Consumer Reports. Their interests are aligned with the customer because it's the customer who pays them.
Admittedly, there is a problem with those publications: Most of them also contain ads. That means advertisers can influence their reporting with the threat, spoken or unspoken, to no longer advertise in them. This is another way ads make products worse and obviously not an argument in their favor.
I think the problem probably lies with the difference between your point of view versus his.
Advertising is not 'prima facie' unethical. It's actually a societal good. I know this is an unpopular opinion, but if you can set aside your emotions with regards to the discussion, and view it from a distance, it's not too hard to show.
To start off, I've never actually met anyone who doesn't want advertising at all (despite their claims). They just use the term advertising to refer to those kinds of advertisements they don't like, or find too intrusive.
Advertising is, at it's base, finding a way to deliver a message to someone who is doing something else. Thus, getting rid of advertising means no more signs on buildings (yes, being forced to read the name of a store as you walk down the street is a form of advertising). Even if you were willing to accept how difficult this would make it to discover businesses (life harder for the end user), this would make it nigh impossible for new entrants to any market. That means that pretty much all commerce would be funneled into a few catch-all stores, and not only would the economy suffer, but consumer power would be greatly diminished.
Advertising indirectly improves the quality of life of people who have more time than money. (Generally the less money you have in total, the more advertising benefits you.) This is because advertising as a source of revenue is a useful tool to amortize the cost of a product over many users. Free-to-watch TV would be mostly non-existent without advertising, not to mention all of the internet services like search and news; also consider free newspapers like the Metro or 20 Minutes.
That doesn't mean that I don't understand what people really get worked up about. Let's forget spam and obnoxious blinking signs, or having to punch the monkey. It's like how knives are great in the hands of chefs, but not murderers. Crime is crime, and someone like the poster of this article is not trying to defend those kinds of practices.
Let's get into what people tend to get really worked up about: customized advertising. However, it's not the customized advertising that really bothers people, it's the fear of abuse of tracking. In a world where customized advertising was perfected, you would see 95% less ads. Why? Every ad you see that isn't a match is a waste for everyone involved. The business doesn't want to pay, because you aren't interested, and the user doesn't want to see it, because it's distracting and wastes your time.
But still, tracking, that bothers you, right? You don't want an advertiser to know your kink, right?
Well, what if the advertiser is the store that happens to serve whatever your kink is? People shop in adult stores, and they have no problem letting the store know that they're interested in their wares, so clearly it's not just the stores learning that is the problem. The problem is the abuse. People want to choose who they trust to share information with, and don't wish to risk. But... if you're clicking on an ad from some store that delivers your own brand of kink, you're okay sharing that with them, so what's the problem?
Well, as an example, maybe if you're a teacher you don't want your community to know that you like buying purple teddy bears because it might cost you your job. You're okay shopping in a purple teddy bear store... but if the purple teddy bear store had advertising that only targeted teachers, suddenly someone knows that you're a teacher that likes purple teddy bears, and you consider that dangerous.
So yes, abuse is a problem. This is why advertisers actively engage in trying to solve the abuse problem. This is why the advertising industry is looking for ways to move forward.
Yes, they also fight the change, because in their own eyes, they're trustworthy (to at least their own standards), and change is hard and expensive. But that doesn't make advertising unethical, 'prima facie' or otherwise.
What if I took your argument, and instead of making it about ads, made it about all human communication? Isn’t all communication intended to influence the thoughts of the listener? I don’t think attempting to influence someone’s behavior to your gain by providing them with information is inherently immoral - we all do it constantly (eg. when messaging a friend to ask them over for a drink, I am manipulating them so I can enjoy their company).
Unlike a lot of communication, advertising is paid, which is certainly relevant. I get it if you’re against commerce as a whole - if you believe that any interaction motivated by money is inherently exploitative, I’m sympathetic.
But if you aren’t willing to go there, advertising is a healthy part of a well-functioning economy. If you’ve invested to develop a good product, one that users would happily pay for, one that has positive value (ie. you can make it for $10, it provides $30 of utility to the user, so you can sell it to the user for $20 and you and the user both gained $10 in utility), what is wrong with paying to inform people about it? Organic word of mouth is slow - if that were the only way we could find out about changes in what is available in the market, much less investment could be profitably made in improved products. Positive investment ROI requires a reliable pathway to tell people that you have something they might want, and advertisement is perfectly suited to fill that role.
Most ads. I am OK with manufacturers, merchants and so on advertising the existence of their goods/ services/ pricing. Communicating the existence of your commercial offering to consumers is a legitimate business activity. But I agree that a great deal of advertising consists of psychological manipulation and that's bad, and the people who do it for a living should feel bad about themselves.
I appreciate that you're trying what you're trying, but I wanted to address this:
> All businesses forgo additional revenue based on ethics and regulation, and I don't understand why that's such a odd thing to do with advertising.
The great bulk of advertising is built upon a conflict of interest and is essentially manipulative. Consider, for example, an article. Both the writer and the reader want the reader's maximum attention on the article for as long as the reader cares to give it. The goal of advertising is to distract from that in hopes of extracting money from the reader. Generally, ads are constructed without much regard to whether the reader was intending to buy or would really benefit from the product. The goal is to make a sale. (If you doubt me, look at how many people who create or show ads, say, test a product before putting the ad in front of people. Or just look at tobacco advertising, a product that has killed hundreds of millions.)
So I think there's an inherent lack of ethics to ads as an industry. It could be that you'll find enough people who are worried about privacy but not about the other stuff to build a business. But I wouldn't bet on it. It's no accident that this security hole is being closed not because of random miscreants but because of industrial-scale exploitation.
I just think advertisement is when other people pay for the media products you get for free, if you don’t buy the ad product. It’s a plus. Why are people so charged up about it? If you don’t want to be manipulated by ads then just don’t be.
Most advertising aims to mislead or manipulate people. Even the unobtrusive ads besides google searches are nothing more than less relevant search results forced on the user.
Advertising is even hard to justify in economics theory, where consumers are usually considered as satisfied when there preferences are met. What's the point for the economy as a whole to mess with people's preferences?
Thats a bit of a pessimistic if realistic take. Advertising in its ideal form is meant to inform you of something that could improve your life (happiness, productivity, health, etc...). It could conceivably be "let the consumer know that our product solves their problems that competitors can't solve or for a cheaper cost." Of course, cutting corners leads to more profits for less effort, so that's what often happens.
Ethically speaking, ads simply shouldn't be manipulating us at all, just informing us of something that might be useful.
> Advertising is an attempt at making the customer pay for stuff.
Yeah that's who's supposed to be paying for things?
It sounds like you're maybe alluding to a kind of advertising that's unavoidable by just existing in the world, like billboards or bus ads or something, but I don't think that's what we're talking about here.
Or I guess a product that you don't know is going to have an ad, you use it, then bam an ad. Sure, in some way that's kind of like taking money without your consent.
But once you know a product uses ads, you can just not use it because you don't like the way they charge you for it.
> - Asking customer to place yard signs on their property
They don't ask the customer to do so out of the kindness of their hearts, they offer a discount on the bill for doing so. Another way to look at that same situation, is, extortion - "run our ad on your lawn for a month or you'll pay more for this work"... And, the discount compared to the length of time they get an ad spot on someone's lawn is probably very much in the favor of the company. Charging someone more money unless they advertise your business, not out of satisfaction, but because the other option is to pay more, isn't very ethical to me, as the customer basically is given a choice that isn't a choice unless they want to knowingly spend more money for nothing.
> - Small businesses putting physical ads in other small businesses
They share ads between each other to try to leach of off each others customers. Maybe even closer to "participate in our shared cartel or we'll send folks to some competitor who does.". Either way, it's not being done to inform folks of something, it's being done to profit and these users are already out, spending money, and close by, so it's the cheapest costing acquisition funnel.
> - Printing shirts, hats, pop sockets, etc. . . and handing them out for free
That merch given out is paid for by the company's marketing budget and that's because what they are buying is ad space with potentially unlimited and extremely cheap display time. You see a nice company giving you a shirt for free. What they see is a sucker who is happy to become a walking billboard that will go to packed concerts, bars, tv shows, friend groups, etc for the price of a cheap t shirt and silk screen, for the life of the tshirt, gaining brand recognition if nothing else the entire time. Manipulating a person into thinking the free shirt they were given is ethical advertising when they are actually being used to freely advertise their brand, not something I'd consider ethical.
> - sponsoring local events/athletes/scholars
All done to get a giant banner on the fence of the field, have your branding stamped on every helmet, bike, bat, glove, shirt, said in every annoucement, etc. They aren't "sponsoring" those things, they are paying for advertising space, and saying it's not that isn't very ethical. They aren't doing anything for the good of the community, they are doing it for mindshare. Redbull on every extreme sport for instance.
> - Parade floats, community bulletein boards, festival/event booths
Parade floats are so the company gets a mention or airtime or mindshare as it passes by people. Festivals and event booths, please see my free tshirt reply. That booth they purchased or conference they sponsored is advertising budget and used to push their product on attendees.
- wrapping company vehicles
> I used to do fleet vehicles for corporations. Company branding applied to company fleets is not advertising. It's so when those service vehicles arrive to a customer, they are recognizable by those expecting them (UPS, FedEX, DHL, Geek Squad, etc). They inevitably get used to advertise, because of course they do, but the only thing they can do is steal mindshare and force through repeat exposure a bias for the company just because you see their name more often. It's manipulation, and hardly ethical.
I'm not going to reply to example after example. No matter the application, no matter they given benifets or percieved value you think they are giving, the end result is for you to give them money, and the fact that so many forms of ads exist that people don't see as exactly that, companies talking you out of your money or otherwise using you to make money (walking billboard), shows that it's not possible to be ethical advertising. Ethical advertising is build a good product, let it speak for itself by being a good product, and let happy customers spread word when they want to, if they want to, and for no other reason than because of the product they are impressed with. If you're not selling garbage, or shit people don't need, you shouldn't have to spend money to manipulate people into thinking they need it.
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