First, I’m cautious about giving examples from specific countries. I don’t want to be disrespectful to members of those countries.
I am a strong proponent of the ‘manmade=sign’ tag.
I don’t know how ‘advertising’ is interpreted in different countries, but I think the examples below are neither advertising nor information.
Furthermore, OSM believes that the properties of a feature are more important than its semantics and should come first.
How could you possibly tag something like this?
Would you be able to tag this feature with ‘man_made=advertising + advertising=board’?
(Thai people, Vietnamese people can easily agree with that? Would people in China accept that a sign with Mao’s face on it is categorized as an ‘advertising’ key?)
I’d rather use ‘sign’, which is more of a physical attribute, than ‘advertising’, which is more of a usage attribute.
So ultimately, I think we should either merge or replace it with ‘sign’, which is more of a physical attribute, or if that’s not possible, we should redefine and reorganize the ‘sign’ and ‘advertising’ tags.