&gt;<i>Is that so? How do you figure? How do you get an item to a buyer that will never be a buyer because he never heard of your product?</i><p>That&#x27;s a problem of the seller. Including the seller of bad goods (who has the opportunity to promote them over good stuff via a bigger advertising budget). Not a problem of the buyer or society at large.<p>Besides, as I said, billions of products are sold every day with zero advertising (all the generic brand items we buy).<p>&gt;<i>Society is not made of people who are 100% consumers. People need to sell stuff to make a living. Advertising is a way to sell stuff.</i><p>Selling stuff without advertising is also a way to sell stuff. We managed to do with 1&#x2F;20 the advertising just few decades ago, and almost 0 targeted advertisement compared to today.<p>Besides buying stuff you don&#x27;t really need just because you&#x27;re conditioned by 24&#x2F;7 advertising is not that good for consumers anyway. That&#x27;s how people end up in debt.<p>&gt;<i>Go ahead an try to sell people &quot;crappy products&quot; with advertising. See if they buy.</i><p>You mean like the $100 billion &quot;bottled water&quot; industry?<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;money.cnn.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;07&#x2F;27&#x2F;news&#x2F;companies&#x2F;pepsi_coke&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;money.cnn.com&#x2F;2007&#x2F;07&#x2F;27&#x2F;news&#x2F;companies&#x2F;pepsi_coke&#x2F;</a>
<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;nadiaarumugam&#x2F;2012&#x2F;10&#x2F;19&#x2F;nestle-sued-again-for-falsely-representing-bottled-tap-water-as-naturally-spring-sourced&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;nadiaarumugam&#x2F;2012&#x2F;10&#x2F;19&#x2F;nestle-...</a><p>Or selling &quot;brandname clothes&quot; to 10-20x markup all around the world similar to quality (and often made in the same factories by the same people) to much cheaper alternatives?<p>In fact you could take away &quot;crappy products&quot; and replace it with &quot;equal quality products&quot; and my argument would still hold: you can artificially promote the brand who spends more on advertising over the brand who is equally good, and might even be cheaper.<p>&gt;<i>We can argue until the sun comes down about what is &quot;essential&quot; or &quot;beneficial&quot; to society, but that&#x27;s entirely subjective.</i><p>Something being &quot;subjective&quot; is not the same as &quot;entirely arbitrary and &quot;anything goes&quot;, unless we&#x27;ve lost all sense of purpose and reasoning.<p>Taste is subjective too, but a home cooked meal with fresh ingredients is better for you than McDonalds and Hot Pockets, and that&#x27;s a scientifically verifiable fact.<p>&gt;<i>I also don&#x27;t understand the very common belief expressed around here that it would somehow be a good idea if humanity were reduced to its &quot;essentials&quot; or to stuff that they &quot;really need&quot;. Art isn&#x27;t essential. The internet isn&#x27;t essential. Comfort isn&#x27;t essential. Entertainment isn&#x27;t essential.</i><p>Only if by &quot;essential&quot; we only take into account the survival aspect. If we take into account our emotional well being, then arts and entertainment, and occasionally comfort, are essential too to one degree or another.<p>On the other hand, an always updated smartphone, the latest adidas, a sports car, etc, are not &quot;essential&quot; by any measure. And it&#x27;s a good idea to reduce them, because their endless production is also environmentally harmful.