Re:What If We Made Advertising Illegal?
by beambot on Saturday April 05, 2025 @03:21PM
(#43596103)
Product catalogs are advertising... The Sears catalog was full of products made by other companies, and Sears paid a ton of money to get those catalogs to as many people as possible
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I think everyone knows that, but the distinction is that the catalog is "pull" in the sense that if you decide to keep your catalog, the advertising is inside the catalog, and you have to physically retrieve your catalog and open it to find what you're looking for (when you're looking for it), instead of the "push" method of running advertisements in every news article and on every bus.
>I think everyone knows that, but the distinction is [...]
The discussion got muddied because in this subthread, it morphed from "What if we made _all_ advertising illegal?" (original article's exact words) ... to gp's (imiric) less restrictive example of "acceptable" advertising such as "product catalogs".
So when the person crafting a reply is using the article author's absolutist position on no ads, the distinction doesn't matter.
I wouldn't call a product catalog advertising, unless I'm forced to read it or receive it without asking. Otherwise it's my own choice to read about the products, which clearly isn't advertising.
This metaphor seems a little tortured to me.
If print media delivered to your door is considered "pull" because you have to open it, then i think so is instagram because you have to open the app.
But when I go to Instagram, I go to look at my friends posts, or at whoever I follow. I don’t go to look at products/ads.
If I open a product catalog, I do that to purposefully look at products.
You forget that people used to get spammed with catalogs, and you could opt-out of them with the postal service because it was such a problem. Receiving too many catalogs or magazines is absolutely a negative form of advertising, even though it is less of an issue today.
When Sears delivered the brand new Sear catelog to my door every year, all nicely wrapped in plastic with shiny images of brand new products, that sure as hell wasn't "pull".
Re:What If We Made Advertising Illegal?
by PebblesRox on Saturday April 05, 2025 @03:37PM
(#43596228)
I think the point is that they're opt-in advertising. You didn't pick up a book and find pages from the Sears catalog interspersed with the pages you were trying to read. You picked up the Sears catalog when you were considering a purchase and wanted to see what was available.
When you visit a ad-supported news website, you're opting in too... No one is forcing you to use that website versus it's ad-free subscription alternatives, it's just that most people have decided they'd prefer the former
The difference is that a catalog is advertising that the viewer actually wants to see. Ads on a news site are ads that the viewer merely tolerates because they go with the thing they want to see.
I get various catalogs/flyers/etc interspersed with my physical mail. They just send it to me, I never opted in.