Comment by lordnacho

The thing that really irks me is celebrity endorsements.

Tell me, do you think Roger Federer really appreciates that watch he's selling you? Does he really use that coffee machine that he sells, and thinks it's the best one?

We know what his motivation is, he is not your friend who bought a watch and a coffee machine, used them, and recommended them to you. He gets paid by the producers of the stuff he endorses.

Plainly, advertisers have discovered a loophole in the human psyche, and are exploiting it. We evolved to take in recommendations from people we know, and billboards/TV/etc are close enough to the real thing to trigger _something_ in us that doesn't just work when it's a non-celebrity whose face we don't know. The effect is big enough that celebrities get paid a gigantic amount of money to pretend they are someone you trust and recommend some product they never even thought about until they got given the deal.

I think we should tax that kind of thing. I'm not restricting his free speech. Roger is free to stand in front of the opera in Zürich and tell random strangers that they should buy the coffee machine. But if you put it in mass media, there should be a gigantic tax.