I used to run a Magic: the Gathering shop right when it opened. We had great prices, great prizes, a phenomenal gaming area, and since I was the only employee I knew the customer service was top notch.
None of that would have mattered, though, if people didn't know I existed. I knew I could eventually rely on word of mouth to grow my community, but I still had to get the first customers in the door for the first time.
And coming at it from the other side, lots of online services that we use for "free" are paid for by ads being shown to us. If those ads were banned, we would see large upsets in how those services are paid for. There's potential for good here, since one possible response could be subsidization and commodification of websites like YouTube, reddit, and Facebook, but who knows what the chances of that could be.
Fine, Let's centralize where ads are shown then. Rather than plastering them across the internet and ruining, just have ads.com. It can even have location-specific ads.
That doesn’t really solve the problem. Nobody will ever willingly go look for ads, meaning the reach is near zero. Modern marketing has largely moved on from the “reach as many people as possible” to “targeted ads reaching the majority of a demographic”, but the core tenant still relies on reach
That is one of the things I really like about the rise of streaming services. You can actually pay to avoid ads, which means that, so far, my kids have basically had a childhood free of TV commercials.
Honestly I'm just wondering what would count as advertisement for this, because it effectively bans any form of political campaigning, by candidates or ballot measure groups, except through public speaking events.
You could even say door to door sales and solicitation would be banned, which immediately drags the law into a knock down drag out with the Mormons and JWs, because otherwise they can't send their impressionable young members out to be screamed at and treated like nuisances so they come back to the fold jaded about "worldly" folks.
If ads work, that means you're manipulating minors. Not acceptable.
If ads don't work, that means you're wasting your money.
Either way, there's no reason advertising targeted to to minors should be allowed.
The advertisers believe that targeting ads to kids is effective to manipulate kids to drive purchases of their products. That's fucking diabolical. Anyone who's in the industry and thinks this is OK needs to be taken to a farm.
I saw one supermarket in my area cover all cartoon characters or similar kid-targeting images on products with stickers saying something like "we don't market to children."