Stop saying advertising is evil
shilin.caI don't agree with this conflation of labelling and signage with advertising, to the benefit of the latter. It's not the same thing at all.
The milk carton has a label so that you know what is inside it. If you were to put the same graphic on a billboard, does that give you useful information about the billboard? Of course not: the advertisement just attempts to influence the decision you will make when shopping for milk in the future.
Likewise, it's one thing to put a store's logo on the building containing the store, and quite another to put it on a billboard, newspaper, or a TV spot. The sign on the building tells you what's in it, which is useful if you are looking for that store; the advertisement hopes instead to implant a desire to go look for the store, which may not otherwise have occurred to you.
Attempting to create a desire for goods or services people might otherwise never have wanted, in hopes of getting money from them they might otherwise not have chosen to spend, does not seem like it is doing any favors for the people being targeted. While a milder sort than many other forms of evil, I do think advertising qualifies.
How do you learn about brands? Let's say you want to buy a watch, how do you find and pick one?
Presumably I would go find a catalog or a review site and read about the options, until I felt like I understood what was available well enough to make a choice.
It's a push vs pull thing. I don't object to the existence of marketing material being made available for those who want to go looking for it, but to the preemptive intrusion of advertising into spaces where it hasn't been requested.
Advertising as a concept isn't evil. Marketing methods that are commonly employed these days (especially online) are, though. When marketers stop spying and putting effort into defeating the defenses of people trying to avoid their spying, and when they stop engaging in outright psychological manipulation, then they can start to make an argument that they aren't evil without me laughing.
Hey, author here. Good point! Historically, all sales people are in a way manipulators, and the best of them are those who know human psychology and behavior. This hasn't changed with how we advertise today. But we should be more restrictive with how we handle the data, who can access it and what they can have access to. That's not as much on the advertising industry as it is on regulations around technology, which is only a recent subject for discussion.
> That's not as much on the advertising industry as it is on regulations around technology
What I hear in that is "treating people badly is OK as long as it's legal". That may or may not be what you meant, but that's what it sounds like to me. I think that's an ethically unsupportable stance.
"defenses of people trying to avoid their spying"
Most people aren't trying to 'avoid their spying'. They want something for free, without ads.
No I won't, because yes it is.
No, I will not stop saying true things.