Say the first thing that comes to mind when you think “Coca Cola.” Say it out loud, don’t edit.

If you said something about nostalgia or polar bears you would be like most humans around the globe for the past 50+ years. I submit that as my evidence that PR and Advertising are remarkably potent.

If you really said something to the effect of “depraved multinational corporation” you’ve eluded their attempts to seer their brand onto your brain 50 times a day. You have steel wit, perhaps your neurophysiology measures a few SD from norms. You have an important role in the solution.

Advertising & PR ought to be illegal, especially with AI driving it. I came from that space and love the creativity, but fear it’s power. Usually where advertising is illegal it just means the state has a monopoly on marketing. It’s not an enforceable policy, and is a meaningful degradation of liberty.

What I think would work is making it unprofitable. Revoke the tax deduction for it. Then make some licensure and oversight for influence operations (my new umbrella term). Register professional services agreements and require quarterly reports. Target ad exchanges like crypto, with a set of standards and Treasury authority.

Frankly, online ad exchanges have been one of the highest volume means of international money laundering and global exchange, and Google et al skimming huge % cuts of 2-5 parts of the transaction. Not regulating it will allow a loophole for continued fraudulent transactions at scale.

Parcels of human “mindshare” are auctioned off with every advertising transaction. Your 5 seconds on YouTube can be worth $5 to the right advertiser. Often that means the highest profit, most coercive players win your attention the most. On web publisher sites, the auction happens in 100ms often in the client at the expense of performance. Always. You can’t fire off 700 requests and not impact performance. It’s for bids to a dozen ad networks and all of their trackers and the winning ad’s trackers and then then do it again every 30 seconds and on scroll listeners, for 6-12 ads plus a video player or two and an exit pop.

Is it just cool that human attention is auctioned off like chattel slavery? Am I wrong to be scared of what billionaires can and have been doing with free reign?

_Citizens United_ really did a number on democracy. Such an ironic name, isn’t it?