Bernie Sanders: We can't allow the food and beverage industry to destroy our kids' health, wants to ban junk food ads targeted to kids

return2ozma@lemmy.world to politics @lemmy.world – 533 points –
Bernie Sanders: We can't allow the food and beverage industry to destroy our kids' health
usatoday.com
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Eh. Some level of advertising is necessary.

I used to run a Magic: the Gathering shop right when it opened. We had great prices, great prizes, a phenomenal gaming area, and since I was the only employee I knew the customer service was top notch.

None of that would have mattered, though, if people didn't know I existed. I knew I could eventually rely on word of mouth to grow my community, but I still had to get the first customers in the door for the first time.

And coming at it from the other side, lots of online services that we use for "free" are paid for by ads being shown to us. If those ads were banned, we would see large upsets in how those services are paid for. There's potential for good here, since one possible response could be subsidization and commodification of websites like YouTube, reddit, and Facebook, but who knows what the chances of that could be.

Fine, Let's centralize where ads are shown then. Rather than plastering them across the internet and ruining, just have ads.com. It can even have location-specific ads.

That doesn’t really solve the problem. Nobody will ever willingly go look for ads, meaning the reach is near zero. Modern marketing has largely moved on from the “reach as many people as possible” to “targeted ads reaching the majority of a demographic”, but the core tenant still relies on reach

I feel that google already perfectly fits this function.

The only other issue is every other tech company wants to share Google's pie.

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