Sao Paulo, Brazil, made outdoor advertising illegal. That worked out quite well.
The US used to forbid prescription drug advertising. That seemed to work.
Ads for liquor, marijuana, and gambling are prohibited in many jurisdictions.
The FCC once limited the number of minutes of ads per hour on the public airwaves. That limit was below 10% of air time in the 1960s.
The SEC used to limit ads for financial products to dull "tombstone" ads, which appeared mostly in the Wall Street Journal.
A useful restriction might be to make advertising non tax deductible as a business expense. That encourages putting value into cost of goods sold rather than marketing.
It's illegal here in Canberra, Australia. There's not total compliance -- people still stick an A-frame on the street, and of course real estate agents will always put something in a front lawn -- but there aren't giant billboards that you see everywhere else. It's really refreshing.
Historically, marketing cost was a small fraction of manufacturing cost. Gradually, marketing cost took over in many sectors. STP Oil Treatment was noted in the 1960s for being mostly marketing cost.[1] Marketing cost began to dominate in long-distance telephony, in the era when you could pick your long distance company. Retail Internet access is dominated by marketing cost.
The total amount of consumer products that can be sold is bounded by consumer income. Advertising mostly moves demand around; it doesn't create more demand, at least not in the US where most consumers are spent out.
Think of taxing advertising as multilateral disarmament.
Advertising is an overhead cost imposed on consumers.
If everybody spends less on advertising, products get cheaper.
Tax policy should thus disfavor zero-sum activity.
Mozilla Corporation spends about 60 million a year or more on marketing—which could fully fund the R&D of an entire goddamn browser—and yet the net result is approximately what you'd get if the annual marketing budget were $0.
Don't discount the opportunity that "advertising" presents to smuggle in a bunch of expenses that are either zero or negative on ROI.
Making advertising non tax deductible has the effect of making it marketing ~20% more expensive, which would lead to about 20% less marketing. But not really. It doesn't really cost YouTube anything to play an add, so YouTube ads get 20% cheaper, and you see the same amount of ads.
Also this would be hard to implement. Tax law has a hard time discriminating costs. What if all the marketing is done by an Irish subsidiary?
The author is identifying a technical problem (it’s become so cheap/easy to insert ads they’re everywhere). Technical answers? How about require that it be easy to opt out, or simply remove the ads from the content. Codify ad-blocking software.
> Sao Paulo, Brazil, made outdoor advertising illegal. That worked out quite well.
it was just a gimmick in the end. yeah the city is cleaner, but i doubt there's even the slightest difference in sports betting in sao paulo vs places with outdoors, for example.
...and did the us forbid prescription drugs ads? thats literally all i see on daytime tv.
the article discussion is about having impact on addiction and behavior... I'm pointing that while there's profit to be made, trying to ban advertising in one way is futile for that end.
yeah you can make the city pretier or get less banners on your sites, whatever. advertising will still happen.
You don’t value the city being cleaner? I live here and the city looks absolutely so much better. For one it has a lot less visual pollution and you can drive with less distractions… That alone justifies everything else for me.
The US used to forbid prescription drug advertising. That seemed to work.
Ads for liquor, marijuana, and gambling are prohibited in many jurisdictions.
The FCC once limited the number of minutes of ads per hour on the public airwaves. That limit was below 10% of air time in the 1960s.
The SEC used to limit ads for financial products to dull "tombstone" ads, which appeared mostly in the Wall Street Journal.
A useful restriction might be to make advertising non tax deductible as a business expense. That encourages putting value into cost of goods sold rather than marketing.