Appealing idea obviously. But I think if everything else stayed the same, and suddenly ads were banned, we'd just see a lot of shady underhand tactics emerging.

There's already lots of grey areas, influencers who are supposedly just talking about things they like but have some relationship with a brand they happen to promote... Is no one ever allowed to discuss a product? Can I promote Librewolf to people? But only as long as librewolf don't give me any free swag? Do reviewers no longer get free copies of book or free screenings of movies? What if I contributed to a project, can I talk about my own work on my own channels?

The viral marketing stuff of the 90s was pretty weird. Dreadful though target online ads are, gangs of people going around the real world trying to influence word of mouth feels even more dystopian. Although, if big companies were encouraging staff to volunteer and get involved in community projects, (and giving them time off to do them) with the understanding that they'd "innocently mention" that they work at Nike, maybe that would be better than the current setup.

In the past, physical buildings often served as advertising. Lots of high end stores on shopping streets are mostly there as a physical advert for the brand, not because they particularly make a profit. Do we really want McDonald's expanding into real estate to start making building reminiscent of the golden arches in visible locations? But maybe even if these alternatives would be intrusive in new and horrible ways, they are limited by being in the real world, and thus not infinitely scalable. And if city centres are revived by brands desperate for attention, and corporations has be involved in communities on an individual employee level, instead of just sticking a logo on something, maybe that would counterbalance the bad with some good.

I'd support a ban on advertising in public spaces, but in digital spaces its a bit nonsense given it funds a lot of things people then dont need to pay for.

The best way to make advertising uninteresting or useless is to provide an alternative form of making money. If the default way to monetise a website, video, or whatever is ads, then ads will continue to be used. If we actually had an alternative that was as or more lucrative, that's what would be used.

"Ban it" also means you need a way to enforce it, and even if it were banned in one country, that's just one country. They might finally come up with an alternative, but why wait for a ban? Why not discuss and test alternatives here instead of just dreaming that a solution magically shows up?

Another part of the problem I haven't read in the comments is all the companies that rely on advertising to exist, especially media companies. Many newspapers, magazines, websites, TV channels etc would go bankrupt if they couldn't earn money with advertising. There is a simple solution because we can 'just pay them' but I'm afraid we won't. People hate advertising (someone commented "advertising is violence", that really says it all), but still many of us choose to not get the subscription but use the 'free' option instead.

I'm not against banning all advertising, but I think working towards more peaceful advertising might be fruitful. Banning advertising of tabacco products and having disclaimers when financial and medical products show this can be done.

Ok but what if invent a new product that nobody even knows how to use? Just hope people take the chance on random unknown thing. Where is the ad non ad line drawn?

Advertising is propaganda, propaganda should be illegal

It won't be though, because it is too powerful to control us