Here's a plan: Tax it. Tax the everliving hell out of it.
The problem isn't the existence of advertising, it is that there is so much of the crap advertising. Taxing ads would raise the price of advertising, which would lower the ROI on advertising and force ad buyers to be more careful about which ads they buy. Crappy advertisers who are not actually connecting buyers with sellers would tend to go out of business, shrinking the industry. The remaining ad industry would have to create less ads with higher quality to compete in the newer high cost marketplace.
Basically, the idea is to move the supply curve on the (on the supply and demand curves) to a place where they meet at a higher price and a lower quantity. See for example, https://www.economicshelp.org/microessays/equilibrium/price-... (scroll down to Tax Incidence). Note that for advertising the 'producer' on this graph is the company making the ads and the 'consumer' is the company buying an ad for their product. The part about moving the curve to a lower quantity is the key! The goal here being to reduce the ratio of 'attention used' to 'product-consumer fit created'. We would have a smaller, better ad industry. We can't have that with current market conditions; competition won't allow it.
The nice thing about a tax plan is that it is pretty easy to sell people on the idea of 'take money away from these people who annoy all of us and give it to [insert social good here]' . The best people in advertising would likely benefit from it as well, as they would likely stay in business and have better margins in a smaller industry with less competition.
So, keep dreaming, but feel free to spread this idea around. Maybe it will grow by word-of-mouth.
The problem isn't the existence of advertising, it is that there is so much of the crap advertising. Taxing ads would raise the price of advertising, which would lower the ROI on advertising and force ad buyers to be more careful about which ads they buy. Crappy advertisers who are not actually connecting buyers with sellers would tend to go out of business, shrinking the industry. The remaining ad industry would have to create less ads with higher quality to compete in the newer high cost marketplace.
Basically, the idea is to move the supply curve on the (on the supply and demand curves) to a place where they meet at a higher price and a lower quantity. See for example, https://www.economicshelp.org/microessays/equilibrium/price-... (scroll down to Tax Incidence). Note that for advertising the 'producer' on this graph is the company making the ads and the 'consumer' is the company buying an ad for their product. The part about moving the curve to a lower quantity is the key! The goal here being to reduce the ratio of 'attention used' to 'product-consumer fit created'. We would have a smaller, better ad industry. We can't have that with current market conditions; competition won't allow it.
The nice thing about a tax plan is that it is pretty easy to sell people on the idea of 'take money away from these people who annoy all of us and give it to [insert social good here]' . The best people in advertising would likely benefit from it as well, as they would likely stay in business and have better margins in a smaller industry with less competition.
So, keep dreaming, but feel free to spread this idea around. Maybe it will grow by word-of-mouth.