我的理论：广告很像资本主义本身。
我的理论：广告与资本主义本身非常相似。
广告和资本主义都很复杂，并且存在一些外部化的危害，但它们比其他替代方案要好。
在“以广告为主导”的客户发现模型中，企业通过广告向市场传达它们的存在及所提供的服务。它们通过在各种媒介上支付广告费用来实现这一点。这包括从店面标识到Craigslist广告，再到电视和复杂的数字广告。
大多数现代广告实际上是一场拍卖，企业竞争向算法认为最有可能感兴趣的客户传达其信息。
这种功能——将可能对产品感兴趣的用户与提供产品的企业进行匹配——目前已经大规模扩展。
希望禁止广告的人通常会提出一个替代方案，即为每个类别提供经过审核的产品和服务目录。他们认为，这将是理想的产品发现方式，配合口碑传播。
然而，这立即面临着与历史上共产主义相同的问题。究竟谁来控制这些目录，这将成为社会的巨大权力源泉？我认为，中央集权有效地管理这一点是不可能的，而最有效的理念和产品传播方式更接近现代营销和广告。
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My Theory: Advertising is a lot like capitalism itself.<p>Both ads and capitalism are messy and have some externalized harms, but are better than the alternatives.<p>In the "advertising led" model of customer discovery, businesses advertise to essentially tell the market that they exist and provide a service. They do so by paying for advertising space across various mediums. This includes everything from their store signage to Craigslist ads, to TV and sophisticated digital advertising.<p>Most modern advertising is an auction where businesses compete to serve their message to customers the algorithms think are most likely to be interested.<p>This function - of matching users that might be interested in products to businesses providing products - is at this point hugely scaled.<p>People who want to ban ads will usually give the alternative of a reviewed directory of products and services for each category. That, they say, would be the ideal method of product discovery, along with word of mouth.<p>However, that runs immediately into the same problem that communism has historically. Who actually controls these directories, which would be a huge source of power for society? I posit that that it is impossible to centralize this effectively, and that the most likely most effective method for idea and product dispersal is something close to modern marketing and advertising.