@jrc03c Advertising is also bad for advertisers. When the US passed laws dramatically restricting advertising by tobacco companies, those companies' profits actually went up, because they weren't wasting it on marketing to compete with each other. In a mature market, advertising is basically a prisoner's dilemma: because your competitors do it, you have to too, but everyone would actually be better off without doing it at all. A ban on advertising would likely improve profits for everyone except marketing firms.

I don't know if it's actually practical or desirable to ban advertising exactly, but we could certainly make it illegal to *profit* from advertising. And the world would probably be better off.