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Advertising destroys everything nice (communities, websites, roads, clothes, architecture, privacy, quality of life, etc.).
Coldest Take ever.
Advertising is literally a major reason our planet and our society is where it's at as it induces unnecessary consumption and materialism.
If Thanos snapped his fingers and sent all of the marketing MBAs to "Planet Marketing"...nobody would fucking miss them. Nobody.
The low effort, saturation advertising we get, yes. Advertising can be interesting or inventive, but not the way it's done now.
I'd quite to see a return how it was 100+ years ago; an image of the product with several paragraphs extolling the virtues. Though perhaps not on billboards by roads.
I generally agree that the world would be a better place without them but there are cases of genius advertisers. The KFC team on Twitter, for example, who followed only 11 other accounts, the 5 spice girls and 6 random dudes named herb.
Interesting and inventive don't equal beneficial, it's all cultural cancer imo. Though it's not the source, it's a metastasization of capitalism.
Not all advertising is made equal, but I do acknowledge that being in the UK, my relationship to it is probably different to someone in the US.
I mean, I'm not inherently against the idea of a company telling people that they offer a product or service. As people who buy things, it's useful to us to be aware that such things exist, and while that's the case, I have no issues with companies being inventive.
But what's shitty is that the biggest, crappiest corporations naturally have the biggest budget to blanket their shitty ads all over the place.
There's an independent burger joint in my town that's pretty well regarded by local residents. It's on the end of a row, and on its side wall is an advertising board over which they have no control. For years, that board was essentially permanently rented to McDonalds, whose nearest 'restaurant' to that board was several miles away. That kind of thing can and should fuck off. It's just nasty bullying.
Advertising can be useful and relatively unobtrusive. I don't use TikTok because I can't be trusted with it, but my wife does, and they'll AirPlay it to our TV to show me ones they've favourited. Every now and then I'll see one that's pretty much an advert for a product, but presented in a way that it's actually interesting, useful information about a thing for which I could well be in the market. And to me, that's fine.
My related hot take: If I'm going to be subjected to Ads, I'd actually prefer to see relevant Ads (generally demographically, geographically, etc. while retaining some anonymity) than ads for products and services I'm never going to care about.
Semi-related, on my language learning journey I've discovered that as I watch more things in the language I'm learning via YouTube, Netflix, and other ad supported streaming services I see more and more ads in the language I'm trying to learn. And surprisingly (even to myself) I genuinely enjoy these ads because the language is usually simple and without much idiomatic use, it's all clearly enunciated, and it's directly related to the action on screen. Of course, everyone else in my household is now also getting those kinds of ads and I can't help but be amused.
Ads in real life spaces though? Unless it's telling me about some specific local thing or place, it is just ugly clutter on the scenery and architecture.
Oh yeah, gambling ads are the worst. That's like a whole other can of worms. I feel the same way about them, predatory and exploitative. They shouldn't really be allowed anywhere. But I feel the same way about ads for casinos, day trading websites, Bitcoin, predictive markets, state lotteries, managed stock market funds, short term loans, multilevel marketing schemes, etc. The all prey on the same ignorance and insecurities.
Look up polish school of movie posters (Polish People Republic era). That's what you get when advertising is not profit driven.