Faith in Advertising

For the record I hate advertising. I hate that a lot of brilliant creative work goes into/gets lost on advertising. And I fully admit, there are some amazingly creative and genius ad campaigns that are nearly art but for the fact that their sole purpose is for you to purchase more crap.

That said, I'd like to talk about developing faith-based advertising. I'm not talking about ads for Jesus-Cola. (He can turn water into 300 calories per severing of miraculous sugary fizz water!) I am thinking instead about showing only ads for things you believe in. Sure, theoretically this happens already. But stop lying to yourself. What I'm actually imagining is something as simple as the links to all of your friend's site on the web. Something homegrown and ideally self written--not like an ad at all--but like a little blurb about why you think someone should look at your friend's stuff and maybe buy it.

In essence, I'm asking that we create from the ground up an advertising that is not business, but is instead recommendation. Something where paid advertising would be consider immoral if not illegal. I'm sure there are plenty of ways to exploit this as well and make it awful. But then we'll just have to figure out something that is a corrective for this next. Thanks.