Imagine A World Without Ads

November 25, 2009 A World Without Advertising By Keith Blanchard, Executive Director North America Whether the average person is exposed to 3,000-4,000 commercial messages a day or 5,000 or some other vague, suspiciously round number, it seems abundantly clear we see damn plenty. They have quietly proliferated across every available surface and airwave our senses can detect; you see them when youre in the bathroom now, in elevators, walking up stairs. Theyre on hats and shirts and sunglasses; and all over our private texts. You can smell them in your hair sometimes. Yes, the world is being papered over like a Sprint Cup pace car, and its OUR fault. Because the more ads they toss in front of us, the better we get at blocking them out, ergo the more ads they have to show us, and so on. If you would just buy the damn cranjuice or erectile dysfunction pill the first time you saw the billboard, they wouldnt have to also slap the ads onto eggs, and body tattoos, and pregnant womens bellies, and everyplace else with a momentarily flat, stampable surface. Its tempting to think were the first humans to suffer this horrible uglification arms race. But in fact, as pointed out here, its always been thus. Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic, said Samuel Johnsonin 1759. As long as there have been products to sell and citizens with money, each generation gets all the advertising it can handle, right up to the point of backlash. The Roman Coliseum, it is rumored, was plastered over with papyrus scrolls for Caesars Salad. (Get Two, Brut?) It follows that if ads really are closer to ubiquitous now, its because weve grown increasingly tolerant of them. I suspect theres a corollary to Moores Law, the famous rule governing the doubling of operations possible on a given silicon wafer. Lets call it Dinty Moores Law: The gross number of irrelevant, ubiquitous, spammy advertisements people will accept in their lives withou t taking up arms against Madison Avenue doubles every twenty years. I have no stats to back that up, but somebody with a college degree should totally look into it. But maintaining a populace on the perpetual brink of rebellion means making most of them at least a little unhappy all the time. Theres been ad skipping technology as far back as 1934, which is incredibly cool. And today, more than 9 out of 10 TV viewers with the ability to do so say they always or usually fast forward thru commercials. Tossing your logo in peoples way and hoping they stumble over it is a horribly inefficient way to sell soap, as has been remarked no less than a hundred gazillion times. Eyeballs is not engagementit only works when nothing else works. But what if it didnt have to be this way? Now that measurably better, more efficient options are emerging for brands to enga ge with consumers, like sponsored content, social media brand conversation, and so on now that the times are finally tough enough to force change at all these hidebound backward-looking media agencies, is it too early to start dreaming? What would the world look like without advertising? For one thing, ballparks would be named for ballplayers. Im a diehard Mets fan, and I am not remotely compelled to put my money in Citibank just because the Mets play in Citi Field. Never, never, nevernot even subliminally. It should be Doc Goode n Field. Games would take place in the daytime, too, where kids could watch em, instead of drunk corporate bigwigs. (Remember, they moved the games to Prime Time specifically to accommodate TV advertisingthats the only reason there are lights at Wrigley Field.) Websites would take you straight to what you came for, with no annoying boxes popping up and blocking your way like street children begging for candy. And web design would be free, not compelled to design around standard IAB ad sizes for banners that nobody clicks on. (Any businessman who bragged about a .2% success rate out here in the meatworld would be laughed into suicide.)

Magazines would feature great content on EVERY page. Instead of 100 edit pages to read on the left and 100 ads that must be manually ignored on the right, youd get say 125 edit pages, with no interruptions and no place to stick your gum. Advertisers could sponsor individual articles (The Norelco Holiday Gift Guide) and get in front of the audience for real, instead of ta king adjacent pages and hoping for peripheral glances. The experience would be more like reading a book. TV shows would deliver seamless entertainment. Instead of car commercials stealing six or eight minutes out of every show, youd get the full 30 minutes, because the shows would be sponsored in a fully integrated fa shion. Imagine an elite force that fights crime with a network of killer cars that just happen to be Dodge Chargers. Megan Fox stars as the by-the-book, yet smoking-hot police chief who keeps them all in line, in a mysteriously tattered POLICE tank top. If the show sucks, it gets no viewers and gets canceled, just like in the real world. This blog post is dated, by the way, so dont try to steal that ide a. The view gets a lot prettier in a world without advertising, and brand marketers can spend efficiently, placing a proper value on creating positive experiences that are associated with brands, and developing customer loyalty over the long haul, instead of throwing millions at campaigns that are gone and forgotten in six months. Its all about shifting the sponsor mindset away from paying to stand adjacent to, or blocking, the good stuff people want to see to creating the good stuff ourselves. Imagine a summer concert tour roundup for a music magazine. In print, you have a grea t traditional editorial featureeditors have a free hand and choose seven bands to highlight, with interviews and rap sheets and so on. And theres a great detailed tour guide map at the center, showing where the seven bands will be each weekend of the summer. But it lures you to a clever online/mobile map widget, where you can add and subtract the bands YOU care about, and virtually sit in different seats, buy tickets, etc. And the whole things sponsored by Burger King, and instead of slapping o n the logos and hoping for the best, the mobile and web apps help you connect with other people heading to your show, literally by finding the Burger King closest to the show youre interested in, connecting online and offline so you can meet up with other people going to the show and exchange mixtapes or bags of pot or whatever. Just an idea. But if we could convince sponsors to give up all the bad, desperate habits weve let them get away with, they m ight just discover the people behind the eyeballs, and learn the benefits of real engage ment. It would sure save a LOT of moneyand we could see the actual colors of NASCAR cars. And the world would be a more beautiful place. This article is brought to you by Smuckers Jam. Mmmnow thats tasty jam!* * Article NOT brought to you by Smuckers Jam.

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Whether the average person is exposed to 3000-4000 commercial messages a day or 5,000 or some other vague, suspiciously round number, it seems abundantly clear we see damn plenty. They have quietly proliferated across every available surface and airwave our senses can detect; you see them when you're in the bathroom now, in elevators, walking up stairs. They're on hats and shirts and sunglasses; and all over our private texts. You can smell them in your hair sometimes. Yes, the world is being papered over like a Sprint Cup pace car, and it's OUR fault. Because the more ads they toss in front of us, the better we get at blocking them out, ergo the more ads they have to show us, and so on. If you would just buy the damn cran-juice or erectile dysfunction pill the first time you saw the billboard, they wouldn't have to also slap the ads onto eggs, and body tattoos, and pregnant women's bellies, and everyplace else with a momentarily flat, stampable surface. It's tempting to think we're the first humans to suffer this horrible uglification arms race. But in fact, as pointed out here, it's always been thus. "Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic," said Samuel Johnson...in 1759. As long as there have been products to sell and citizens with money, each generation gets all the advertising it can handle, right up to the point of backlash. The Roman Coliseum, it is rumored, was plastered over with papyrus scrolls for Caesar's Salad. ("Get Two, Brut?") It follows that if ads really are closer to ubiquitous now, it's because we've grown increasingly tolerant of them. I suspect there's a corollary to Moore's Law, the famous rule

governing the doubling of operations possible on a given silicon wafer. Let's call it Dinty Moore's Law: The gross number of irrelevant, ubiquitous, spammy advertisements people will accept in their lives without taking up arms against Madison Avenue doubles every twenty years. I have no stats to back that up, but somebody with a college degree should totally look into it. But maintaining a populace on the perpetual brink of rebellion means making most of them at least a little unhappy all the time. There's been ad skipping technology as far back as 1934, which is incredibly cool. And today, more than 9 out of 10 TV viewers with the ability to do so say they always or usually fast forward thru commercials. Tossing your logo in people's way and hoping they stumble over it is a horribly inefficient way to sell soap, as has been remarked no less than a hundred gazillion times. Eyeballs is not engagement...it only works when nothing else works. But what if it didn't have to be this way? Now that measurably better, more efficient options are emerging for brands to engage with consumers, like sponsored content, social media brand conversation, and so on--now that the times are finally tough enough to force change at all these hidebound backward-looking media agencies, is it too early to start dreaming? What would the world look like without advertising? For one thing, ballparks would be named for ballplayers. I'm a diehard Mets fan, and I am not remotely compelled to put my money in Citibank just because the Mets play in Citi Field. Never, never, never...not even subliminally. It should be Doc Gooden Field. Games would take place in the daytime, too, where kids could watch 'em, instead of drunk corporate bigwigs. (Remember, they moved the games to "Prime Time" specifically to accommodate TV advertising...that's the only reason there are lights at Wrigley Field.) Websites would take you straight to what you came for, with no annoying boxes popping up and blocking your way like street children begging for candy. And web design would be free, not compelled to design around standard IAB ad sizes for banners that nobody clicks on. (Any businessman who bragged about a .2% success rate out here in the meatworld would be laughed into suicide.) Magazines would feature great content on EVERY page. Instead of 100 edit pages to read on the left and 100 ads that must be manually ignored on the right, you'd get say 125 edit pages, with no interruptions and no place to stick your gum. Advertisers could sponsor individual articles ("The Norelco Holiday Gift Guide") and get in front of the audience for real, instead of taking adjacent pages and hoping for peripheral glances. The experience would be more like reading a book. TV shows would deliver seamless entertainment. Instead of car commercials stealing six or eight minutes out of every show, you'd get the full 30 minutes, because the shows would be sponsored in a fully integrated fashion. Imagine an elite force that fights crime with a

network of killer cars that just happen to be Dodge Chargers. Megan Fox stars as the by-thebook, yet smoking-hot police chief who keeps them all in line, in a mysteriously tattered POLICE tank top. If the show sucks, it gets no viewers and gets cancelled, just like in the "real" world. This blog post is dated, by the way, so don't try to steal that idea. The view gets a lot prettier in a world without advertising, and brand marketers can spend efficiently, placing a proper value on creating positive experiences that are associated with brands, and developing customer loyalty over the long haul, instead of throwing millions at "campaigns" that are gone and forgotten in six months. It's all about shifting the sponsor mindset away from "paying to stand adjacent to, or blocking, the good stuff people want to see" to "creating the good stuff ourselves." Imagine a summer concert tour roundup for a music magazine. In print, you have a great traditional editorial feature...editors have a free hand and choose seven bands to highlight, with interviews and rap sheets and so on. And there's a great detailed tour guide map at the center, showing where the seven bands will be each weekend of the summer. But it lures you to a clever online/mobile map widget, where you can add and subtract the bands YOU care about, and virtually sit in different seats, buy tickets, etc. And the whole thing's sponsored by Burger King, and instead of slapping on the logos and hoping for the best, the mobile and web apps help you connect with other people heading to your show, literally by finding the Burger King closest to the show you're interested in, connecting online and offline so you can meet up with other people going to the show and exchange mixtapes or bags of pot or whatever. Just an idea. But if we could convince sponsors to give up all the bad, desperate habits we've let them get away with, they might just discover the people behind the eyeballs, and learn the benefits of real engagement. It would sure save a LOT of money...and we could see the actual colors of NASCAR cars. And the world would be a more beautiful place. This article is brought to you by Smuckers Jam. Mmm...now that's tasty jam!* * Article NOT brought to you by Smuckers Jam.

Times Square and Piccadilly Circus without their famous lights? Newspapers and magazines a fraction of their current thickness? Fifty minute television programmes over in fifty minutes?! Modern life would be very different without advertising. Is it the sort of life we'd want to live? Could it be achieved? Banning advertising should not be ruled out, though such a path would not be easy. Any politician wanting to ban advertising would find herself up against powerful lobbies. She may even be told her idea is in breach of one interpretation of her country's hallowed constitution. Advertising, after all, can be interpreted as free speech, and advertisers regarded as humans, legally speaking. Still, unless we want to live in necrocracies we should ensure constitutions written by dead folk can be rewritten by the living: change is in the hands of the people. And there is a precedent of sorts. In So Paulo, one of the world's ten largest cities,billboard advertising has been banned. Advertisers fought the ban, of course, and tried to frighten people into thinking it would have dire consequences. In the event, however, it proved popular with citizens who now telephone the mayor to report any breaches. So what does advertising do that's so bad we'd want to ban it? And what does it cost us? Advertisers tell us they provide us with information and it's hard to argue with that. It is, however, often information we don't want or need: I don't suffer from 'restless leg syndrome', but I still have to sit restlessly through the commercial offering a remedy. It is also incomplete information: company X will tell me how good their product is, but will omit the fact that company Y's product is even better. Sometimes, of course, it is wrong information, although in countries where tough regulations are enforced this should be rare. Advertising entertains and beautifies, or so it can be argued. Some television and radio adverts are fun or funny, though the effect wears off after a few repeats. Likewise some billboards or print ads. Just as often, however, they can be dull or ugly. Apart from its legal status, there is little difference between a billboard and graffiti. Both can be beautiful or vile; neither can be avoided with ease. Advertising drives people to switch brands. Millions of dollars, euros, pounds and yen are spent trying to get young people to switch from Adidas to Nike, or vice versa. From a global perspective, the millions are wasted. Where Adidas gains sales, Nike loses them; but the same number of sports shoes are made by Third World workers paid a basic minimum or less, then shipped around the world to places where people can afford to buy the blessed things. The name on the shoe makes no difference. Advertising also aims to bring about new purchases. It aims to make someone who has never felt the need to buy brand name sports shoes change their minds. In this it is effective simply by bombarding consumers with the same message: buy more. Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation did a spot check and found that in one day he was told to buy things 454 times; in the same day he received just three communications reminding him to be a good citizen. (Listen to his radio report, which begins 19 minutes into the January 1 edition of the World Tonight from the BBC.) In a world in which overconsumption is bringing about catastrophic global warming, these may be 454 messages we cannot afford. Which brings us to the costs of advertising. Since we don't pay directly for advertising, it's easy to imagine it comes without a price. The truth, however, is that we pay for it in almost everything we buy. If I buy a bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup in WalMart, part of the bill will go towards WalMart's advertising and part towards that of Heinz. When added up these costs are huge.

Designing, printing, producing, directing and filming so many thousands of adverts for thousands of products every year is a vast industry and it's all paid for by you and me. These adverts subsidise elements of the media, which may explain the media's general lack of criticism. Some newspapers are free to the reader. They are paid for entirely by advertisers. (Again, that means us.) The same is true of some television and radio stations, websites and search engines. And the papers and magazines we do pay for would be more expensive were it not for the adverts they carry. Yet overall, we'd pay less without the adverts. It would cost less to print The Times without all of its adverts; and surely it would be fairer for the readers to pay for the full cost of the newspaper, rather than relying on contributions from non-readers who buy items advertised in its pages. It would also make environmental sense for newspapers to become much smaller. A lots of trees could be saved and waste could be minimised if our broadsheets and tabloids were cut down to size. And of course there are environmental costs in the making of television and radio advertisements as well. A final, less tangible cost which springs to mind is the opportunity cost of human creativity. A lot of very clever people work in advertising. What if they were set free to do something useful instead? Perhaps a potential Shakespeare is squandering his talents for Sony; or a new Wordsworth wasting his writing on Wilkinson's Sword. Who knows what ideas the environmental movement could gain if some of these creatives came over to the light? Who knows? Personally, I'd love to see advertising banned. If it didn't lead us all to live sustainable lives, it would at least make that move more likely. Perhaps business listings in telephone directories, brightly painted shopfronts and classified ads could be allowed to survive when I am world president. Oh, and public service adverts reminding us that carrots do us good and wearing a seat-belt could save our lives. But I doubt any widespread ban will come our way until real environmentalists find themselves in positions of power. Until then, perhaps we can only dream about headlines like this: Pepsi to cease advertising. (From 'the Onion' consider the source!)
Related PlanetThoughts.org reading: The Nightmare After Christmas (Feb-1-2014) Learning From China: Why The Existing Economic M... (Sep-20-2011) IT-Enabled Green Solutions (Jan-16-2011) It'll Be Tough Enough Without The Hair-Shirts (Sep-15-2010) "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of..." (Aug-27-2010) I Is For Inequality (Jan-25-2010) The Footprints Of Consumption (Dec-29-2009) Population, Consumption And Our Ecological Footp... (Dec-3-2009) Throwing Out Food and Paper Will Be Illegal! (Nov-23-2009) Climate Denial Crock Of The Week: Birth Of A Cli... (Oct-10-2009)

We All Hate Advertising, But We Can't Live Without It

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Advertising plays the same role in your media diet that vegetables play in your regular diet; most of us would prefer to skip that course and go straight to dessert. But, just like veggies, advertising plays an important role in sustaining a body; in this case, a diverse body of content. Advertising is the great subsidizer of the press, entertainment, and online services. Its possible that no single industry not newspapers nor search engines nor anything else has done as much to advance the storehouse of accessible human knowledge in the 20th century as advertisers, argues Washington

Postcolumnist Ezra Klein. As I noted in a recent law review article on the importance of advertising, media economists have found that advertising has traditionally provided about 70% to 80% of support for newspapers and magazines, and advertising or underwriting has entirely paid for broadcast TV and radio media. Similarly, the vast majority of online sites and social media services we enjoy today arealmost completely ad-supported. Without advertising, wed all be stuck picking up the tab for our media content and online services by either paying higher prices or higher taxes (assuming public subsidies are used to sustain media when other revenues are unavailable). Whenever advertising comes under attack, therefore, the proper question to ask is: If not advertising, then what else? After all, there is no free lunch. Something must sustain content and culture and that something is typically advertising. The reason this issue is ripe again this week is because, in an effort to remain relevant in todays vibrantly competitive video marketplace, satellite video operator DISH Network is offering its customers a new Auto Hop capability for its Hopper whole-home HD DVR system. It will give viewers the ability to automatically skip over commercials for most recorded prime time programs shown on ABC,

CBS, FOX and NBC when viewed the day after airing. Viewers love to skip commercials, said Vivek Khemka, vice president of DISH Product Management. With the Auto Hop capability of the Hopper, watching your favorite shows commercial-free is easier than ever before. Its a revolutionary development that no other company offers and its something that sets Hopper above the competition. Khemka is certainly right about consumers loving to skip commercials, but his product isnt that revolutionary. As veteran technology reporter Steve Wildstrom reminds us, back in 2001, ReplayTV introduced a similar feature in its DVRs. The company was quickly sued by content companies and went bankrupt before the case was decided. The sort of commercial-skipping technology ReplayTV introduced back then and that DISH is adopting today with Auto Hop shouldnt be illegal. Making video ad-skipping a crime is like saying it should be illegal to cut the ads out of newspapers or magazines before you read whats inside. Of course, a legal challenge to Auto Hop is still likely. But set aside the legal question and get back to the real issue here: What is going to pay the bills for content when ad-skipping becomes automated and effortless? That question is

relevant across the entire information ecosystem today since its never been easier to use technology to block ads for television or online services. Just about every DVR now allows commercial skipping. And ignoring online ads is even easier.Adblock Plus, which lets users blocks all advertising on most websites, has long been one of the most-downloaded add-ons for both the Firefox and Chrome web browsers. Such free-riding cant go on forever, no matter how much we all enjoy it. Content creators will either have to find alternative ways to pay the bills or else well just lose access to much of that content. And the alternatives to traditional advertising support all have downsides. One possibility is that advertising continues but it becomes far more annoying and intrusive. Thats already occurring to some extent with the increased prevalence of product placement in TV shows. If ad-skipping or blocking during designated commercial breaks become even easier, you can expect to see you favorite characters doing more awkward productpitching directly within the program. Most of us would agree that degrades the quality of programming, but it will become increasingly likely. Another variant of this is model is program sponsorship and content underwriting. We could see a lot more Texaco Star Theaters in

our future, with major companies essentially owning specific shows or networks. But it will be challenging for every show or website to find its own corporate benefactor, and it will also raise issues about undue influence and bias. The other alternative is higher prices across the board. When video distributors cut deals with content creators, the contractual negotiations can get quite heated. The retransmission consent process for TV programming, which is governed by an arcane body of federal law, is already a mess but it promises to become even more contentious if distributors like DISH make ad-blocking even easier. Content owners will demand a higher premium before they cut deals and those costs will be passed along to consumers. The same phenomenon could play out for online services if ad-blocking becomes more ubiquitous. Of course, theres the possibility that philanthropic support either from individuals or foundations can sustain some media content, but such support has proven quite limited in the past. And government support for news and entertainment content will be hard to come by and incredibly contentious politically, especially in tight fiscal times. So, no matter how distasteful we might find ads, like our veggies, wed be wise to keep them in our diet. Or else there will be a price in the long

run.

Would you like to live in a world without advertising? Imagine a world where every product you bought was in a white, plain box. The product name and other texts are printed on the box in a bland, black font and there is nothing to identify it colour wise. You walk out of the shop and every billboard, every item clothing, shop front e.t.c. is black and white. Nothing is identifiable. Welcome to the world without advertising.Advertising and branding come hand in hand. If you dont have a brand to advertise then there is no point making an advert. So what defines a brand? A brand can be identified by any colour, name or graphic that you can identify as a product, for example is you see a can that is turquoise blue and says Heinz on the front, you can guarantee that it is a can of beans. Brands give us something to distinguish between product and is one of the main tools that advertising uses to promote brand names and products. So without brands there would be no point in advertising anything? To answer this question you will need to look at the goal of advertising. Advertising is a tool used by competitors in business to promote their product as being better than their competitors product, therefore ushering the consumer to purchase a product made by the company with the more convincing advert. People are going to want to buy a product more if it is being sold to them as something that will completely change their life, and if it fails to do that, then the brand that lost the fight in getting the consumer to buy will ultimately do financially worse and possibly go bust if they were to suffer more defeats. If you didnt have the brand, there would be nothing to compete against within that certain market as there would be no difference. For example, if Heinz were to scrap the look of the can label, get rid of their name and change the flavour to a more bland flavour along with every other company that made beans, what would be the point in advertising a product? it would all be essentially the same thing that you were being, with no distinguishable features to sell to a consumer.

Okay, so now imagine a world without advertising, there would be no need for branding any more, as even that is advertising in itself so it would not exist in a world without advertising. Everything would very bland as I described at the start of this entry. Everything would be generic. In a way, I think it would be a refreshing change from the constant media barrage and peer pressure of advertising as it would probably make everyone feel less stressed and pressured, the world would calm down a bit. However, in terms of economy, advertising is big business and keep products flowing, generating capital for the big companies that sell us our beans. Also, and most importantly in my opinion, it would be a bland and boring world, with no variety and no room for personal taste and creativity, which is within human nature to crave after. Besides, variety is the spice of life right?

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