What would happen if mass advertising were banned?

• Setting aside the improbability of the scenario, imagine a national ban on all mass advertising. Mass advertising is defined as follows: "Any mass media created with the primary purpose of persuading consumers to purchase, or change their opinion about, any service, product, organization or brand. This includes, but is not limited to, all television commercials, billboards and outdoor advertising, print ads in newspapers and magazines, radio ads, direct mail marketing, mass text messaging, and online banner ads." Put your wildly creative futurist hat on. Where would it be "safe" to advertise under this ban? Where would all the advertising dollars go? How would brands and companies communicate with consumers and market themselves? If you had a 10 million dollar advertising budget and couldn't buy TV ads, billboards, print ads, etc., what would you spend it on?

• Answer:

  This is such an important question. But, know that Advertising in the United States is an 80+ billion dollar industry. Before getting to the details, consider the impact of eliminating almost all of that. Millions of people would be out of work and we would enter a new great depression. You thought the housing crisis was bad? Just wait for this one. 1. Media and News itself would become a luxury First of all, you would see an almost immediate dissolution of almost all mass media outlets. Television, Radio, Publications, etc would all go extinct as the bulk or even totality of their operating budgets vanished. I'll leave the results of that up to another question. The New York Times pay model would now be the way all of us get our news. The price to access media would climb, making news a privilege of the elite. Any offset of that price due to advertising would now go away, making the entry point prohibitively expensive to a great portion of the country. Perhaps a rider to this imaginary bill would be a greater funding of publicly funded news organizations (but of course, where would that money come from in a crippling depression?) Read on to see why it doesn't just stop at the elimination of an industry. 2. Reach is Eliminated along with Efficiency of Scale A benefit of broad channel advertising and awareness is driving larger volumes of business. By removing that option, Businesses will now need to focus on more local, grassroots movements. This means businesses that are built on economies of scale, like Farming, would have to be overhauled to avoid wasting vast quantities of food. A focus would return to local, small growers. But keep in mind that 1000 local small growers can't produce and distribute as much food as one corporate farmer with as much land. Efficiency of scale is vital to serving a population of a modern country. Car companies, for example, require reach of advertising in order to sell enough cars to reduce the cost of vehicles to reasonable ranges. What is the break-even point of a car factory? Things to think about. The transportation industries would now dissolve as a result. The need to move goods cross country would become too expensive to streamline. Trucking companies would soon die off as well. Goods would become unique to local areas. Of course, this means a massive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions as a result of trucks. There's a positive side to everything. 3. Commoditization of Everything An absence of persuasion is a pipe dream, truly. This doesn't just mean that advertisers can't influence one commodity over the next, it also means companies can't share the differentiating factors of their products directly. An organic food supplier wouldn't be able to tell you his crops are chemical free, a car manufacturer (if he could even produce enough cars cheap enough to make them) would not be able to tell you about his energy efficient engines, and so forth. You get the picture. 4. The Chicken-Egg Dilemma Exaggerates What's the catalyst without persuasion? How do companies get their products into the hands of consumer without telling consumers that they exist? If Apple didn't have a brand like theirs or used commercials to sell the concept of advertising, how do they sell the iPad? Nobody knows what an iPad is, so how would they light the spark? Social Media would be the final frontier, but how do you seed that? It takes time and resources to seed a campaign. The methods to help develop a social media channel would be all but gone. The price of starting to do business would be catastrophic without the ability to advertise on a reasonable scale. 5. Marketing Dollars to Innovation The only positive impact I can imagine would be that a greater focus would be set onto products themselves to compete without words. The days of crappy As Seen On TV products would go by the wayside. Manufacturers and service providers will have to offer real value to customers without the means to persuade otherwise. What can solve our mass persuasion spam-fest? Eliminating the ability to persuade is not the answer. People are passionate about what they're selling, and they want their customers to be too. That may sound like persuasion. Oftentimes, the persuasion is insidious and invasive, and perhaps that's what we'd like to eliminate. Digital gives us the answer to those problems by offering advertising solutions that are better targeted to individuals that care about them. This, of course, goes hand-in-hand with offering up some information about yourself which most are hesitant to do. Its a catch-22. Advertisers can tell people things they want to hear if they know something about them, but those people don't want to tell the advertisers anything.