Large companies should have a harder time advertising than smaller ones. The truly great companies will spread by word of mouth alone. Unscrupulous and destructive companies will find it much harder to get a footing when they can't manipulate people into buying their trash.
In re to your example. If you were to pay your family members (in any way) that would be wrong in my book. If your family does this out of the goodness of their hearts then so be it. It's their unpaid labor. I fully realize that no solution will stop every avenue of abuse. However, seeding crowds with people up selling your widgets only works for so long. you'll never be able to reach scale with those methods because eventually the irs will audit you or your family members and even though you wouldn't go down for illegal advertising you would go down for not paying taxes. Or you'd find that having enough family family members to seed every crowd is getting you unwanted attention, or is just too darn expensive.
By banning all advertisements except advertising in person, at the location of sale and for only items sold at that location there would be very little room for manipulation. Obviously the time share/used car methods would still work, but I haven't ever seen a way to make that profitable with low margin items, where many consumers get fleeced by huge ad budgets.
Basically, I think everything but shouting about your products from your shop should be illegal. I can see concessions made for websites that don't sell anything, and charge transparent/flat fees for listing their info in a web directory that is intentionally bland. However, writing legislation for that would be a whole lot harder to draft than what I've already stated.
I realize my desires are unrealistic. That being said, advertisings days of doing whatever creepy crap they want to without punishment are numbered. Either the industry will reform itself (unlikely, it's too easy to delude oneself when pulling $500k for selling fidget spinners) or, eventually, some people are going to be nailed to the walls of Congress as examples.
In re to your example. If you were to pay your family members (in any way) that would be wrong in my book. If your family does this out of the goodness of their hearts then so be it. It's their unpaid labor. I fully realize that no solution will stop every avenue of abuse. However, seeding crowds with people up selling your widgets only works for so long. you'll never be able to reach scale with those methods because eventually the irs will audit you or your family members and even though you wouldn't go down for illegal advertising you would go down for not paying taxes. Or you'd find that having enough family family members to seed every crowd is getting you unwanted attention, or is just too darn expensive.
By banning all advertisements except advertising in person, at the location of sale and for only items sold at that location there would be very little room for manipulation. Obviously the time share/used car methods would still work, but I haven't ever seen a way to make that profitable with low margin items, where many consumers get fleeced by huge ad budgets.
Basically, I think everything but shouting about your products from your shop should be illegal. I can see concessions made for websites that don't sell anything, and charge transparent/flat fees for listing their info in a web directory that is intentionally bland. However, writing legislation for that would be a whole lot harder to draft than what I've already stated.
I realize my desires are unrealistic. That being said, advertisings days of doing whatever creepy crap they want to without punishment are numbered. Either the industry will reform itself (unlikely, it's too easy to delude oneself when pulling $500k for selling fidget spinners) or, eventually, some people are going to be nailed to the walls of Congress as examples.