The title of this might seem like hyperbole, but I can assure you I am serious: I think that advertising should be banned.

I am also aware that polarizing and extreme views are common clickbait hooks in this day and age, and that if I share these thoughts, the sharing itself could be considered a form of advertising. The irony and hypocrisy are not lost on me. However, I ask that for the next few minutes you listen, with hope that a seed is planted in your mind that may grow over time to perhaps join me on a journey of anti-consumerism.

I’ll start with something that most people can resonate with - adverts are irritating. A search engine showing a random competitor when you search for a specific company. A music streaming service letting you know where to buy the best all-in-one meal replacement, right after track 4 of your favourite album. Watching the final act of a three hour film be interrupted by a trailer for the new holiday-special romance, available to be streamed, right now.

Advertising in the media has been around for as long as I’ve been alive, and long before that as well. Radio stations playing adverts between songs, cinemas playing trailers before films, entire pages dedicated in newspapers. Just because these practices have been around for a long time, does not mean that they should exist. Why do adverts exist in these artistic mediums? It’s an exceptionally easy answer: money.

If Company A is approached by Company B, and they ask “Will you show our fancy new product in a place your customers can’t avoid”, Company A is very likely to reply “For how much?”. This is the inherent nature of capitalism - how can a company acquire more capital. It’s easy to argue that this is fine, the customers of Company A can simply choose not to engage with the company if they don’t want to be advertised to. But what if there weren’t any alternatives to the services Company A offers? What if all companies were advertising in the same way?

My argument is this - I don’t want to be advertised to. I have eyes that see, ears that hear, a nose that smells; I don’t want my senses to be accosted by a company trying to sell me things. I don’t want my horizon to have 30 feet of billboard blocking the view. I want to experience the world without a company telling me that I need to consume.

Consider the last time you used public transport, let’s say a train. Were there adverts on the outside of this train? How about the inside? How much of that advertising was filling your vision at any point? Did you engage with those adverts, or did you subconsciously ignore them? And if so, how much of your day is spent ignoring your surroundings, purely because those surroundings have been plastered by corporate sponsorship?

“But won’t this harm small businesses?” you may ask. I would argue that small businesses are already harmed by advertising - they inherently have less capital than larger businesses, which means less ability to purchase adverts which attract the most attention. I draw a similarity to those experiencing economic hardship who still believe socialism is the devil’s work and capitalism is supreme. In both instances, if capitalism were a game, they would be losing it.

So, where do we go from here? What if we did ban advertising? How would society, and businesses, move forward?

We would see how word of mouth and community shape the success of businesses that provide value or quality services. Companies would be forced to provide services of higher quality, with competition between businesses now driven by the benefit they bring to people, rather than how much they can spend on adverts. I would expect with the banning of advertising that many businesses would close, or have to drastically change the way that they operate. That’s the entire point - I don’t want businesses to be successful based on how well they market themselves, I want businesses to be successful because of how well they service society.

Now to be realistic, I doubt that this will happen in my lifetime, but as I said at the start, I wanted to plant a seed. Adverts have insidiously crawled their way into all aspects of our lives - to exist in our current society is to exist surrounded by advertising. I hope that over time we can start to take back control over what we experience, pushing back on the onslaught of capitalistic consumption.

I ask that the next time you experience an advert, to take the time to think on these questions:

“Was there any good to having experienced this advert?”

“Has this advert enriched my life in any way?”

“Did I want to experience this advert?”

Side note - two points which I wanted to raise but didn’t fit in nicely:

- Firstly, a loose idea of opt-in advertising. For instance, a single page in a newspaper in which businesses can market themselves, with all businesses limited to the same size of space. However, the page is at the back of the newspaper so I can choose not to open it. Similarly, adverts that are played at the end of a film; the key point to this is that it is my choice as to whether I experience them.

- Secondly, influencers. I’d like to speak more about this in the future, but the existence of human adverts troubles me a lot. I worry about not only the irreparable damage it is doing to societal engagement, but also to the “influencers” themselves as humans.