What silly inconvinient stuff would you outlaw if you could?
I'd outlaw sauce bottles which make getting it all out harder, especially the ones which don't have the opening at the bottom and make it impossible to put the bottle with the opening facing downwards.
There is so much unnecessary advertising in my country. Billboards, commercials on a screen at fuel stations, placards on park benches. None of it has any tangible benefit to regular people. None.
Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
In the US there are 4 states that have outlawed billboards: Vermont, Maine, Alaska, and Hawaii. I absolutely would not complain if it became nationwide.
Some states also seem to prohibit billboards on certain stretches of highway. There was a state highway I used to take daily in Connecticut and there were no billboards anywhere.
Broaden this to any ads on the streets. Billboards are the most egregious, but I'd actually kill for a society where I can get from my home to a grocery with nothing trying to sell me something.
I am okay with the business itself having signage on its property visible from far enough away for travelers to make navigational decisions. I'm also okay with those state-issued signs on large highways that point out things like lodging, fuel and food which must conform to certain guidelines. And in this case, I'd prefer using clear and distinctive logos which are recognizable by color and shape so that motorists can recognize them faster and spend more of their attention on the road.
I think those could be considered less ads and more just informational postings, particularly the food and fuel lines a la the signs at each interstate exit that tells you the amenities available near any given exit. Considering, as well, that they usually have several competitors on the same sign, and it feels even less ad-like
It's closer to the scale of what "advertising" should be if it wasn't the bloated cancerous mass that it is today. I want businesses to exist and I want interested customers to be able to find these businesses, but I don't want to be told "I'm not a dish, I'm a man" nine times an hour. Signs along the interstate that say "Hey at this next exit there's a McDonald's and a Denny's, an Exxon and a BP truck stop, and a Holiday Inn" are genuinely useful.
I'm ambivalent on this one. If the ad on a building serves to keep the charges from tenants lower then I don't mind (given the ad is somewhat tasteful). Ads for the sake of ads? Yea, fuck that.
I disagree with the requirement for plain labels. Trademarks exist for consumer protection as well as business protection; I want Gatorade to hold a trademark on clear bottles with lightning bolts on the front and orange caps, because I don't want to be fooled into buying Negligent Uncle Greg's Geterade. If anything, I would force companies to use fewer of them; no hosing Amazon with 900,000 differently branded permutations of the same product.