The "economic value" of billboards shouldn't even be a question. It's self-evident that billboards benefit the owner of the billboard at the expense of everyone else. Nobody looks at an empty patch of sky and wishes there were an advertisement there instead.
Don’t know what you consider a normal product but for truckers and people coming from NY adult stores and fireworks are “normal”
You can escape online advertising by walking away from the computer.
There's nowhere you can walk to escape physical advertising. Maybe the desert.
No, it just means you need to not open a web browser, or install an ad blocker. Opting out of physical advertising literally means this. I'm not saying that online advertising isn't bad, but physical advertising is inescapable. Your very food packaging is covered in it. The real world has primacy here, because you live in it and can't turn it off.
I find it hard to believe that a better version isn't possible.
they've been so successful in their advertising they've just managed to get people to call them "tech".
tech would probably be untouched, and who knows, might even flourish a bit once people stop wasting their time and paycheques to make the world a worse place.
Product placements in TV and movies continues to grow each year, and an increasing proportion of seemingly organic social media posts are bought and paid for by companies, though never disclosed. I have a friend who has basically spent the last ten years helping brands to pay influencers to promote their stuff in subtle ways (first on YouTube, then Instagram, now TikTok), and her business has never been better.
The only ads I encounter are physical. Adblockers don't work for billboards. :D
> As for television ads, ugh! Maybe once every year or two I happen to be in the same room as a television that’s turned on, and how anyone can stand to watch the stuff when such ads are part of it, I don’t know.
This I realized when I was 19 while on LSD and it was a revelation. I put the TV in the closet and never had one since (or, well, one that I only used through HDMI so it was a monitor rather than a TV).
When I go down to the big smoke (Melbourne) I find the prevalence of billboards, side-of-bus ads, &c. physically distressing—and then they make it worse by using screens for them so they can change their contents, make them glary, &c. and it’s just awful. And it becomes ever more and more intrusive; Melbourne’s trains used to be safe spaces, then they put billboards on the platforms, then scrolling billboards, then ads in the carriages, then animated billboards on the platforms, then billboards with speakers on the platforms, and I wonder just what they’ll come up with next. I really dislike the city. There’s a reason I moved out into the country.
As for television ads, ugh! Maybe once every year or two I happen to be in the same room as a television that’s turned on, and how anyone can stand to watch the stuff when such ads are part of it, I don’t know. Maybe if you grow up with it you don’t realise quite how obnoxious it is?
I have concluded that display advertising is just fundamentally bad and that our society would be better if it were outright banned in all its forms. I would even sympathise with vigilantes that went round demolishing and vandalising billboards on principle.