>>>So, yes, innocence is gone. Anything touched by advertising is dirty.
>
>"The man who stops advertising to save money is like the man who stops the clock to save time." -- Thomas Jefferson
>
>We need advertizing to know what's available in the market. Oranges on sale this weekend? How would you know?

Correct, with emphasis on "know" and "available". IOW, let the buyer know and enable him to make an informed decision.

Today's advertising is mostly providing negative information - the more you get, the less you know. You aren't even allowed to know whether what you buy to eat is food or industrial junk, is it GMO or real stuff... and the information on the package doesn't list ingredients by percentage, it gives you "nutrition facts" with all the trick played with rounding down and having ridiculous serving sizes. Most of the time you don't even know where it was made (but you can safely assume it was made in China and assembled wherever they say, and imported from wherever they say).

About six years ago I was looking for a headset with a longer cable. A 1,5m would be nice. I've checked out about a dozen of them, of different brands, where the same obvious facts were repeated several times, on each side of the box, but the cable length was nowhere to be found. The clerks, of course, didn't know jack because they weren't paid to know, they were paid to stock the shelves, watch for theft and generally only needed to know on which aisle is something. Worse case, about 30 boxes until I found a night stand clock which could be switched from 12+12 day to 24h day. Possibly half of them were capable, but it didn't say so on the box. Recently, I've seen a lot of boxes where the technical details are altogether missing, and the backside just repeats the same staged photo as in the front.

That's cinderblock+security camera retail (brick and mortar may be the façade, irrelevant). On the web, it gets worse. Most of the time, the technical details (which I need to know to make my decision) are hidden behind lots of blurbs. Sometimes they are the same blurbs with one extra line.

And then the price. On a real market (like the farmers' market, retail or just about any bazaar), the price is almost the most important part of what they say when they shout out their wares. Well... nowadays, not so. Most of the time, I simply give up on buying a piece of software (and few services, and physical things) because their pricing would take so long to read through and understand what it means, that I'd probably be better off (financially) just blindly buying one from the middle - the cheaper ones missing crucial features which are the reason I want to buy, and the more expensive ones being corporate stool I don't need. But often it's not so simple - the one feature I really need is the one that makes it 30 or 50 or 100% more expensive. Sometimes I go for an open source, even if it isn't polished and still has a few annoying bugs, as long as it generally gets the job done and saves me from having to read through pricing.

The worst offenders are those who don't disclose the price. Call us, they say, and we'll pass your call to our sales shark who knows every psychological trick in the book, has all the distractions at hand and will walk you over to the dark side in no time. Along the way he'll gauge the depth of your pocket and calculate the price from the delay of the echo therein.

Now on the other hand, "what's available" is assuming that you can see all that's available. And that's where the advertising paradigm gives advantage to the big players - they advertise in the venues others can't afford (like this thing on Google will be), they have stadiums named after themselves (or build them just for that reason), they can buy prime time on TV, they cover the fronts of the most prominent buildings etc etc, while the smaller ones can't go further than local newspaper/TV, a bit of a website which doesn't get much of SEO, and perhaps a leaflet mailed locally. Then let's not forget that "available" means "available in retail" - and retail won't buy it if they think it won't sell, and if it isn't sufficiently advertised, they think it won't sell. The "advertise so that your buyers know what's available" becomes "advertise or your wares won't be available", i.e. a racket, which we all pay.

I'd love to live in a world where advertising doesn't go further than it did in Jefferson's time. It would be so much easier on my eyes, nerves, time and pocket.