By "break the ad industry" I don't think they meant "make it so you can't inform others that you have a product that you are selling".
Now, the following hypothetical is a rather stupid hypothetical, but imagine if the government made it so that, as part of jury duty, you had to select a couple categories of product, and be presented with a random selection of around 5 descriptions of products in each of those categories (companies could bid to have their product listed I guess) ( the descriptions would have to be straightforward descriptions of the product and optionally some of the ways in which it is demonstrably different from competition),
and also, at the same time, banned banner ads on websites.
This would be stupid and tyrannical, yes, but it seems to me like it would "break the ad industry" while also not really "doing away with capitalism".
To be very very clear : I do not advocate implementing the policy that I just described; I think it would be a very bad policy.
This doesn't break the ad industry at all, it just obfuscates the process. Like, how do you narrow the list of 300 watchmakers down to 5? How does one watchmaker establish a reputation to allow him to be successful that doesn't lead to recreating the ad industry?
The only way to get rid of advertising is to just commoditize everything, which is what communism aims to do.
The selection of the 5 from the 300 is randomly selected for each time each person goes to jury duty. (If it is in a category that few people select, perhaps prioritize options that hasn't been shown to people as often)
So, I don't see the issue with the "narrowing down the list of 300 watchmakers down to 5".
This ensures that some people become aware of the different new products.
If they find any of the products that they see to be remarkable, they might purchase it, and quality can spread by word of mouth.
Also, there could still be people who do reviews of products, they just legally couldn't receive any compensation from the people selling the products.
