Wait wait wait...hold the effin phone here. Advertizing is now bribery? Of whom, and how? How is paying someone to essentially play "Pimp My Product" bribery?
What is bribery and why don't we like it?
Okay, so the legal definition of bribery is: "He offers, confers or agrees to confer any thing of value upon a public servant with the intent that the public servant's vote, opinion, judgment, exercise of discretion or other action in his official capacity will thereby be corruptly influenced;..."
(This is a definition applying only to public servants; obviously a bribe offered to a person who is not a public servant remains a bribe).
What are the elements? 1) Money offered, 2) in order for a person to exercise their power (et al) in a manner they would not otherwise, 3) improperly. What do we mean by improperly? Dishonestly. Why is it illegal? Bribery increases transaction costs, reduces the effectiveness and responsiveness of the bribed organisation, undermines public accountability, ect.
Okay, what is advertising? 1) Money offered, 2) in order for a person or corporation to exercise their "opinion, judgement, exercise of discretion", 3) in a dishonest and improper fashion. A person in an ad is essentially endorsing a product does not do so honestly, because it is a good product, but in proportion to the amount of money that corporation has paid them. The commercial station does not run advertisements because it thinks the product is good, but because it has been paid to do so. In a similar way, a corrupt judge does not let XYZ off murder because he thinks him innocent, but because he has been paid.
Now, you could argue that there is less harm caused by this sort of bribery than through normal corruption. You could argue it, but you'd be wrong. The sole purpose of advertising is to distort market forces, and to clog up the natural price and information signals of capitalism. If we treated the bribery by commercial companies of television companies they way we treat their bribery of, say, judges virtually everything would work better.
Literally the only thing commercials do is negative. They should not exist.
Advertising also informs consumers of what products exist. That is not negative.
So does a catalogue, except cheaper, more completely and honestly. Advertising only tells you about the products that are advertised, and in proportion to their advertisement. It is also totally inaccurate about the content of those products. A catalogue is not.
As far as it being bribery, by your definition bribery happens all the time. We bribe companies to give us products.
Element 3. Improperly. It is not dishonest for a store to sell you a cabbage in return for compensation. That is not a dishonest use of its power - in fact, that is the honest use of its power. It would be dishonest to ask for an outrageously disproportionate amount of money in return for a product, which is why we have laws against that.
If advertising is a violation of somebody's free speech,
That's the secondary effect of advertising, not the primary one. Advertising first subverts the market process and then second places all advertising-reliant industry under the control of the major advertisers. Which is why you don't see socialist newspapers anymore - nobody will advertise in them. Why would a corporation finance a political movement dedicated to destroying it?
I don't know about everyone else, but I don't have much inclination to go out of my way to find out about every new product outside of the areas I already have awareness of.
Then it's a wash. You can not find out about products and buy at random (or the cheapest, probably) whether or not advertising exists.
Also, the things said in advertisements are usually biased, but we do already have laws against dishonest advertising and advertising that is not disclosed to be advertising.
You're not allowed to say that your ten-inch spanner is twelve inches long, but you can say that it's the best hammer on Earth. if you get good at it, people even believe you - despite the fact that it is a lie.
Even worse, these laws are routinely
violated with no punishment.
I've noticed that since I no longer watch TV with advertising, I often have no idea what movies are coming out. It's something I do somewhat miss. I could look up the information but it's much more convenient to be informed as I use the break to grab a sandwich or whatever.
Okay, so maybe we have an honest show on TV during the breaks in programming to tell you what is in the movies.
Fred, prison as a consequence for what? Who went to prison and for what?
Criticising a corporation. Why shouldn't the "consequence" of criticising a corporation include government torture?
The funniest bit is that tobacco can't be seen in shops anymore. I literally mean that it is illegal for shops to have tobacco packages visible. Or even any pictures of them.
Australia has similar-ish policy. We have plain packaging - which is a bit of a misnomer, it isn't plain, it's actually pretty horrific, it has pictures of fucked up lungs and what have you, the consequences of long-term smoking. The idea is to reduce consumption firstly by reducing the opportunity to market the product - cigarettes - and secondly by reminding everyone what it does. It appears to be working.
One of the interesting things about banning cigarette advertising: in the 90s, when this kinda started, tobacco profits exploded. Went absolutely through the roof. Almost as if they were wasting their money. To big corporations, advertising is an arms race - if anyone falls behind, that individual company suffers. But, in the aggregate, everyone is worse off for wasting money on advertising.
Anyway, the cigarette problem is not the problem with advertising in the aggregate. The point of banning advertising isn't to reduce the sale of product - in fact, that would be a negative consequence if it happened, which would have to be fixed through government policy. The point of banning advertising is to make people buy the
best product or the
cheapest product not the
biggest product.
You talk about an end to advertising reducing the opportunity of small businesses to advertise their goods. Small business does not have this opportunity. A lot of advertising has a disproportionate effect compared to a small amount of advertising. A million dollars worth of ads is worth more than a million times more than one dollar worth of ads. It is also true that start-up companies simply do not have access to the revenue needed for advertising. This disproportion is one of the real problems to do with advertising.
Here's how an efficient market works in theory. Consumers purchase either the cheapest or the best product. This drives inefficient business out and forces those to survive to cut costs in order to attract consumers. Because the cheapest good is the most likely to sell, the market will eventually reach equilibrium. This process also drives innovation - a new business with a better process can produce better quality goods and therefore sell, even if in direct competition with long-standing corporations.
What happens if people do not buy the cheapest product? What happens if consumers buy the product that is best advertised? The whole thing falls apart. The innovative new companies are kept out by old inefficient, heavily advertised, companies. Bad.
Ever notice how the far right and the far left don't really look all that different when you get right down too it? Neither thinks that the common man has the intelligence to think for himself and needs to have the elite lead him around by the nose even if it means enacting very draconian laws and sharply curtailing freedom to do it.
There are, I think, two possibilities. 1) Advertising is pure waste, and has no effect, positive or negative. 2) Advertising does have an effect - an entirely negative effect. If you don't think advertising has an effect on consumer behaviour - and you're objectively wrong - then you think it doesn't work and should be banned.
