A little anarchy, but not the hurting kind...

A large number of people seem to feel an overwhelming urge to call other people's phone numbers for the purpose of selling them something. In recent decade(s), they use an auto-dialer, and size their systems so that they are likely to have more victims answering their phones than bots or call center humans available to provide the spiel to the victim. Hence the commonest experience on answering the phone is probably dead air.

I get it. It costs them essentially nothing to interrupt millions of people, some out of a sound sleep, and they might possibly get one sale - or successful scam - out of doing this, so their behaviour is good capitalism in action (sic). Whereas regulating them out of business would be a terrible infringement of their freedom. And as for jailing their CEOs, well CEOs shouldn't face more than monetary consequences even if they knowingly sell products that kill some of their customers.

So free enterprise has provided two "solutions".

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I'm told the benefit of advertisements to "consumers" is helping them find out about opportunities they might appreciate.

The current system does this horrifically badly. Many ads are content free; I can't determine either the name of the product or its type from watching, just that it's being positioned as being used by attractive young people. (Worse yet, unsolicited calls that don't give me any message at all, unless I get "lucky" and few others answer that spammer's robocalls in that particular instant.)

Those that do give me enough information to determine e.g. that it's XYZ brand laundry detergent, and maybe even whether it's in liquid or powder form, generally tell me precious little else, and what they do tell me is often misleading, if not outright false. If I were buying laundry detergent, I'd first of all want to know whether it includes scents, whether it includes bleach, and what it costs. It would be helpful to tell me where it can be purchased. And in the general case, I'd like some impartial evidence about cleaning efficiency, tendency to clump or clog the washer, leave residue, or result in allergic reactions. I might get some of that from e.g. Consumer Reports, and other parts from the product label, but I won't get any of it from most advertisements, let alone all of it.

I also can't generally get this information when I want it. Instead, I get a month of the same damn ad for the same damn product, every time I listen to a particular podcast. Or I get six months of automobile ads, starting the week after I purchase a new car. Or I get pop-ups I hardly even see, interfering with whatever I'm trying to do - all I focus on is "how do I close this damn thing".

Advertisements designed to keep people informed about opportunities would be available on demand. They'd lack feel good nonsense. The source would list all relevant offers, not just offers from those who paid them the most. There'd be a "new product" section for things I didn't know existed, broken down somewhat by type (food? tool? apparel? etc.), as well as more specific categories (hammers, nails, 3 inch twist nails, finishing nails, ...) Some of those would have a discrete button - always in the same place - "show me other things that serve the same function". (Maybe I'd prefer a screw to a twist nail, for some specific project, if I thought about it.)

I wouldn't have to "consume" 10,000 repetitive ads of products I already know about to hear about one that I've never heard of before, and 500 or more of those to hear about an unknown product that actually addresses some use case relevant to me.

In the past decade, I've encountered two products new and useful to me. One is the Squatty Potty and equivalents. The other was a pair of plastic "bucket boots" for convenient soaking of sore feet. The draw was that they spill less, and take longer for the water to cool, compared to more generic water containers, which tend flat and open.

I became aware of both by word of mouth.

I'm fortunate that I know people who do a less effective job of blocking ads than I do. Their 10,000 wasted hours "consuming" ads sometimes produce one ad that would be of interest to me - and them too - and they pass it on. In rare cases, they recognize something of interest to me but not them, and pass that on.

I am, nonetheless, regularly missing things I would have liked to have purchased, because I just can't bring myself to spend enough time screening the contents of the ad fire hose. I only have a limited number of hours in my life, and advertisements only rarely provide anything remotely useful.