But ad blockers are a recent innovation in controlling advertising. Billboards... you can lobby your local city or state to pass laws against obnoxious billboards, but at some point it is someone else's property, and they'll be able to put some kind of advertisement there.
Ad blockers let you edit your reality, immediately and easily. It's a big change and our historical acceptance doesn't carry over.
>you can lobby your local city or state to pass laws against obnoxious billboards, but at some point it is someone else's property
Such bans are completely possible and within the rights of a local jurisdiction - they're just extremely rare and not something society generally seems to care about. In actuality, branding and advertising is engrained in our culture. I hear friends talk about their favorite ads all the time - instead of the TV show the ads interrupted. I know a very large number of people who watch the Superbowl "just for the ads". I can't convince anyone who visits me in NYC to skip Times Square, because they really want to see that pit of blinking ads for themselves. Many moviegoers love how the theater wastes 15 minutes of their time playing previews (i.e. ads). I could go on and on with my biased examples :)
My point is that we are a consumerist society; anyone who has worked in advertising lives off of this fact and knows it's true. The real problem is internet advertisers took it way too far.
I guess that you're right, mostly. Initiatives to pass city laws against advertising do exist, though [1]. I don't live in Grenoble so i cannot comment on how this plays out in practice, but i wish all cities would do that.
The supreme court ruled that billboard bans based on location (for city and land planning purposes) would be appropriate, but billboard bans which determined which kinds of content were appropriate for public discourse were unconstitutional. A blanket ban across the state is constitutional, but a ban which targets certain kinds of content is not.
Five years ago, Sao Paulo, Brazil, banned all outdoor advertising. All. Not just billboards, large business signs had to go too. It worked out very well.[1]
I'm not sure where the balance is. Too many is certainly bad for a city as well. LA has seen a big increase in strip club billboards. Not sure why that popped in my head.
I actually enjoy the ads on trains in Tokyo and learn about all kinds of stuff from them from products to events at museums. I noticed the lack of ads in the Paris subway (in the cars themselves) left me kind of bored. It doesn't help there's no mobile signals in the subways.
In my city, we banned outdoors advertising that used animation, flashing lights, lights in any kind, and anything with a bounding box larger than 25 m²
You might be surprised by the computerization and tracking that competently-designed out of home ad setup will run. They are surprisingly good at figuring out who drove by their billboard.
Ad blockers let you edit your reality, immediately and easily. It's a big change and our historical acceptance doesn't carry over.