Take the set of every product you buy which has an advertising budget or component (cereal, cars, foods, clothes, electronics, everything that is produced by a compnay with an advertising budget, and which you have paid a single cent to directly or indirectly.)
do the same for services, infrastructure, etc. Remove the advertising component and put it back in your pocket. E.g. if a shoe had cost $50, now it costs $30 because you've removed the shoe company's adveritsing component. Same for every product. You're now 30k per year richer.
However, you are now underinformed. Now pay for some apps that you would have seen the advertising in, in order to inform you. You are now only 15K per year richer after that additional direct outlay.
However, this direct outlay is smaller than the indirect outlay had been, because you are not supporting ad agencies, marketing managers, sending your products' message to people wildly not in its market, and so forth. you are paying for apps which inform you directly.
In addition to the fact that you have "cut out the middleman" - all this friction of paying people to send out messages on your used products' behalf - you (and everyone) ALSO gets the benefit of not having this constant high noise floor, of having to see tampon ads when you're a guy, beard care when you're a lady, and so forth.
In other words, EVERYONE is better off. There really is no catch - just like there really is no catch that there is 0 advertising necessary to get people to know about municipal water works.
If everyone had to constantly see ads about the benefits of getting water from a tap, even the people who already had that, AND it cost you - and everyone - 40% more due to all the advertising...well, that benefits no one doesn't it? We really can live in a cheap and cool world which as as good with respect to advertising as our daily interaction with water works advertising is: none at all, and the product is cheap and works and everyone knows about it and has it.
No this is not how it works. Without the advertising, many products would never be discovered at all by the buyer. The opportunity cost of not doing advertising is much higher for seller than just the dollars spent.
Do you really believe people just make products and they magically get purchased? Products are not utilities and your water utility example is so ridiculous I hope you are joking and trolling us all.
That's not how marketing works, now or ever. The sole purpose of marketing is to drive sales of a product or service. Marketing is profitable to the seller if (a) it yields more customers/clients than in the absence of marketing expenditures and (b) net income is higher (either larger profit or a smaller loss). See e.g., Apple, which spends more on marketing every year than the combined GDP of several dozen small nations.
Removing marketing would not magically make everything cost cheaper; marketing is usually a small % of a product's costs. Several of my clients are multinationals selling various consumer goods; for them marketing is almost a rounding error compared to COGS, payroll, or facilities (i.e., less than 5% of gross expenses).
The primary effect of removing marketing is that suddenly all sellers and service providers would have difficulty reaching new customers. This would benefit existing companies, but it would kill startups of all kinds (tech and non-tech alike).
