Thinking about whether ad creep is inevitable is a bit of an obsession with me. I try not to bug people I know by constantly ranting about it. Instead, I reserve such rants for this space (that's my basic argument here: being a tolerable company or a tolerable human being is all about knowing where to put certain messages). I like to think that I'm refining or extending my arguments, but maybe I'm just repeating myself. Here goes.
2 likely possibilities for which we might gather evidence:
1: ads have crept up a little in terms of where they are and how much of our conscious and unconscious attention they take up, but not all that much. There's always been push-back from consumers, and so they've reached a permanent stalemate w/ advertisers and sellers. Ads don't work perfectly, but they work well enough to be worth the trouble for the sellers.
2: prevalent promotion of any kind, much like record labels, is a holdover from a pre-networked information economy. During the broadcast era, the infrastructures and content needed for the pre-eminent modes of mass communication - TV and newspapers - were expensive to set up and maintain, so expensive that subscription fees wouldn't have covered the cost. During the networked communication era, the infrastructure had a high up-front cost but the cost of maintenance, while hardly nil, is far less expensive than that of traditional broadcast media. In addition, the cost of providing content of acceptable quality (user generated content, once it gets going) is virtually nil. The supplementary revenue generated for the service providers by advertising is not as essential as it was during the broadcast era. In addition, there are less expensive ways for the producers of goods and services to reach target markets (say, those in the market for a re-financed mortgage) than splashing ads everywhere. As a seller, you could spend money trying to cultivate demand where there was none (which advertisements do all the time, but is an expensive, unreliable, and difficult task given the ever-increasing, ever-evolving savviness of consumers) or you could spend less money targeting those who are "in the market" for something you sell to begin with. Since low overhead and greater sales trump all in a capitalist marketplace, promotion outside of a designated "marketplace" becomes obsolete. The practice will persist for awhile, especially in places where networked communication is less ubiquitous, but only due to institutional inertia which decays over time.
Argument for 1: promotion of goods is inevitable. I would grant this. If we want to use history as proof, we would see that promotion of one kind of another exists in every known culture in every place in every era (not that history should be used as an argument for what humans are capable of, but for the moment, we'll accepts this argument's utility despite its shortcomings). You can regulate it and restrict it, but if you do this too much, it would handicap your nation's companies in a global marketplace in which it must compete with less-regulated markets.
Argument for 2: In most cultures, promotion was/is relegated to a certain space - the marketplace. If you went to the marketplace, you were prepared for people selling their wares. If you were in a domestic setting, if you were listening to a story, if you were at work, you heard far less explicit or implicit promotion of goods or services.
What happens when ads move outside of the marketplace? You get greater sales, for the time being, but you also eat into the collective brain power of everyone in your culture. More time spent paying attention to ads, attempting to resist ads, and engineering more sophisticated ads is less time working, socializing, fucking, etc.
I'm particularly interested in studying the side effects of promotion that are not noticed by the conscious mind, b/c this seems to be the way advertising is going. Most product placement works this way. Maybe some online banner ads work this way on you. Its pretty well established that this kind of advertising works to some degree, in that it can convince us to buy things we wouldn't have bought had we not been exposed to the ads, though consumers cannot notice when it works. This is good in the sense that, unlike explicit advertising, this doesn't interfere with conscious processes (e.g. our abilities to concentrate on a complex narrative, to do work, to socialize w/ others). But it may interfere with unconscious processes. I would bet that our brains are working through things without our being conscious of it. The result of this "working through" is a stable sense of self, an ability to generate new ideas, and an ability to find some sort of equilibrium in social relations. It is possible that if you introduced a signal that interfered with that unconscious processing, it might prevent us from doing those things as effectively.
You can't determine whether or not this is the case by simply asking people. If I could conduct an ideal experiment, I would take some similar people, immerse some of them in ad saturated culture, immerse the others in the same culture where the ads were relegated to certain websites and physical areas (stores, neighborhoods, malls), and see if their abilities to do other things changed over time.
In closing, I might ask why telephones or electricity were never served up w/ ads. Why were we charged a subscription fee for those without having to pay for either service through our attention to advertising? Why weren't our telephone calls interrupted every five minutes w/ very brief ads for something? Was it just some artifact of the early monopoly on both which trained us to be intolerant of interruptions, or is there something about the proximity of extremely personal information (on the phone) and unrequested content (ads) that we can't tolerate (in which case we would be less tolerant of ads alongside emails than embedded in hulu videos). Surely, we would've complained about ads in our phonecalls but then, given the lack of other viable options, we would've tolerated them, and this would've generated more $ for advertisers, sellers, and the phone/electric companies. If ads work, as a way of selling goods and as a business model for media providers, then why aren't they literally everywhere?
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