If I had to compromise, I would agree that more agency and less intrusive ads and tracking are a start.

[0]: https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...

[1]: https://coil.com/

Reminds me of how one day, I think in SF, I was trying to go around without reading things and just realized there are so many things shouting at me with words, especially billboards and other forms of public advertising. I would love to even have a city here in the US experiment with something like this.

> I would gladly raise my taxes to eradicate public advertising permanently

I would, too, especially as a consumer, and yet, as a producer, I wonder how annoyed I would be without ads. Maybe there's a balance, and I believe needs to be have more consumer voice, and less producer voice.

> Naturally, how this could be implemented is far beyond me, as are the economics behind advertising, so I suppose I'm doing little more than wistful thinking.

Lol, me too. I guess it comes down to how much does advertising actually work and if advertising disappeared, what downstream impacts would it have on the economy (and would those be "bad")?

I think part of the reason I'd like to go into public office is to run these experiments and also I feel sad that more public offices don't seem to run that many experiments :-)

I'm in the exact same position, I'd love to see a large-scale experiment to determine the economic and psychological impact of removing public advertising, or at least reducing it to a more "comfortable" level, whatever that may be. The Canadian government experimented a bit with universal basic income in the 70s, and more again recently with COVID, so perhaps they'd be willing to give this a shot as well.

> I would, too, especially as a consumer, and yet, as a producer, I wonder how annoyed I would be without ads. Maybe there's a balance, and I believe needs to be have more consumer voice, and less producer voice.

Another concern/shortcoming I forgot to address above is what companies will do to get their products out there; will advertising take a more subtle, perverse tone if they're not allowed billboards and banner ads? Perhaps a middle-ground will stop a more covert extreme from appearing. Perhaps I'm falling for the middle ground fallacy.

Private spaces like inside shopping malls is fine for me.

I like the idea that inside a private building is opt-in/consent, whereas outside of it is not.

> There's not that much physical world advertising in my part of Europe (e.g. almost no road side banners at all), but I still despise how we've sold bus stops and metro walls to the highest bidder

I lived in Germany for a few months and was shocked to see advertisements for cigarettes on the sides of the local buses. I suppose this will be changing in 2022, so a good first step [0].

[0]: https://www.thelocal.de/20200918/germany-set-to-ban-cigarett...

Now that Near Field Comm has arrived and active invasive advertising soon is likely follow us everywhere we go, it's time we consumers reasserted ourselves and took back control of our eyeballs.

I do think that value is there though. Some of our best marketing for AutoTempest has been through youtube sponsorships where we find creators and videos relating to cars and car buying, and work with with the creator to include a pitch for our service in exchange for (usually) a flat fee. It's dead simple for both sides, and as long as what you're advertising is legitimately useful and you're transparent about the relationship, the response from viewers tends to be very positive. I suppose it could be trickier if your product had a very niche audience, but I would think these days there are corners of the web targeting every niche, so you just need to find where your potential customers hang out, and go there, rather than trying to target them wherever they might be.

Not on the scale of the internet and you give some good examples that are egregious. a lot of it is just 'adtech' bs, but it's there.

and the traditional in-store transaction data marketplace is huge. Companies have been tracking you and your purchases around forever.

passive bluetooth IDs track you in store - though didn't iOS mitigate that by changing them frequently? idk maybe not.

There are some 'eye tracking' billboard tech but it's kind of dumb imho. The simpler is just trying to estimate impressions.

though maybe that's more digital ads than not. but collecting, selling, aggregating consumer data, combining it with purchase data, and using that for direct marketing ha been around for ages.

I remember the internet in the HoTMaiL era, all of the adds where mainly about casinos, porn and such, and very rarely interested to me.

I personally think that if tracking is done with good intentions, it shouldn't be an issue. At least from my point of view.

I rather see totally relevant ads than have again "casino/poker/porn" ads.

I don't agree about the good intentions. The tracking is a means to an end. People are tracked to measure engagement and to target ads, both of which have the purpose of increasing the value of the advertising to the benefit of the ad networks. They don't care if you get relevant ads. They care that they can charge more for your eyeballs because they can classify you as "male, 19-29, in USA, interested in technology, art, exercise" and sell you as part of a package to companies wanting to target that market.

They need to track so that they can "prove" they did what they sold.

The challenge with having access to that much information is that it can be very powerful and a very lopsided/asymmetric power. I remember when Facebook had Open Graph Search-when any user on the platform could perform complex searches of their friends, friends of friends, and more. It was so powerful at times it freaked me out how powerful it was. I could search for friends of friends who are women who live in San Francisco who speak Spanish who are single and who like Dave Matthews and it would give me a list. Facebook shut it down a few years ago, but I imagine something similar still exists on the advertising side of things (side note, there was someone a few years ago that used the advertiser tools to send ads specifically to his one friend as a prank). So for me, why should some groups have access to this information and others not? Who gets to control who has so much info?

Again, the info itself is not necessarily the problem I see, it's the asymmetry and how those people use the asymmetric info they have on me, which can be to powerfully help me or hurt me or maybe even ignore me.

"Oh, that's where it is. I couldn't find the product because the ad was in the way." Grocery store standalone displays partially blocking aisles and shelves are a pain during busy periods. You get cart jams.