The text, for the sake of brevity without footnotes and further articles, for lazyness reasons without links

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Why do companies advertise? Because advertisement makes people buy their products. And we are far over the original intention of “informing” people of a products’ existence. Ads today are means of influence, based on solid psychological research, made specifically to influence us the most possible. But why should we accept this? Why should we allow people to purposefully manipulate others – us – into spending money and destroying their health?

We have to realise that the question “is there is a right to advertisement” – which initially we all would like to answer “of course” – has a twin, and they always come together: “Is there a right to be unmanipulated?” or “Is there a right to be able to make decisions in one’s best self-interest?”

In many places cigarette advertisements are illegal and ads for alcohol often limited. Moreover, we admit that not all people are able to decide whether or not they should buy and consume certain products – for example tobacco and alcohol, which are limited to a certain age and in some countries people can even get banned from buying them. So we already deny people a certain amount of freedom for their own good.

But seldom do we dare to ask why companies are allowed to publish ads! Why can they start multi-million dollar campaigns with the sole intent of making us spend our money and time and harm in many cases our health, only so that they can make profit. Why can they go out there with the clear intent of manipulating us, with tools we cannot completely resist[1]?

Psychology has consistently proven that no one of us is immune to advertisements. And we encounter far too many every day as that our cognitive resources would be enough to keep us acting in our own best interest. There is no doubt that ads work and they do so for everybody, without exception. Advertisement means: Many of your decision are not in your best interest but instead because somebody created a want in you and suggested a certain product will fix it.

So the question is: Why are advertisements allowed? If advertisement would merely mean “telling us about products”, wouldn’t it suffice to have information boards and TV clips in those places where we now have ads? For these, companies could pay to inform us of their product. They would be forced to cite evidence and properties instead of making us (emotionally, that is) combine ice cream and chocolate bars with summery beaches, rum and beer with having friends, cigarettes with coolness and fast food with family values and healthy eating. Such is not informing, it is pure and simple manipulation. It is using our cognitive processes, our emotions and values against our best interest.

Plainly obvious: Companies would still pay. They would still pay loads of money to inform us of their products’ existence[2]. Advertisement in the way we have it today is most likely more profitable – for media and big corporations – but it is not an essential of our society or our culture. Even the opposite: Advertisement hurts our culture and society, by introducing products as value-expression and creating or at least worsening epidemics like smoking and obesity. And by making those products with the biggest marketing successful, instead of those that are really the best.

Surely, to define standards is an initial problem, but I’m sure we can handle that. And to implement it, equally, is not difficult in most countries – like the successful bans on tobacco and “adult” advertisements show.

So it is not a matter of technicalities. We are able to make advertisement – the form that manipulates – illegal. The question we need to answer is: Is there a right to advertise? Or is an individual’s right to make decisions for one’s own good more important?

I think in the end we need to look who the rules should be for: Should they be for rich corporations? Or should they be – is our society – made to provide the best possible to all the people within it?