Attitude and advertisting

Attitude and advertisting

Jan 21, 2025

Adverts

In 2007 it was estimated by one marketing team at Yankelovich, Inc. that the average person in the UK is exposed to 5,000 advertising messages per day. In 2015, Ron Marshall of Red Crow Marketing corroborated this estimate by dedicating an day to counting the advertising messages he saw and reported seeing 487 before he’d finished breakfast. We can assume with the emergence of TikTok and the improvement of targeting algorithms in the last 8 years that that number can only have gone up. 

Given that in the 1970s, that the figure would have been around 500 ad messages per day and if you go back as far as the 1920s, it may well have been in the 10s, we have clearly developed a numbness to advertising and an acceptance of its presence in our daily lives. Ron Marshall remarked that if he wasn’t actively counting, he wouldn’t have noticed the majority of advertising messages he came into contact with, but they were there. Life has become like walking down a shopping aisle, but you don’t necessarily know you are in the shop. 

There are a few reasons for this: advertisers have become very good at blending advertising into every experience we have and the developments of recommendation algorithms make everything seem ‘personalised’ and therefore more palatable. 

While advertising spend continues to grow year on year, statistics on the consumer perspective paint a different picture. A report published by Bulbshare shows that nearly three-quarters (74%) of consumers feel bombarded with ads. The same percentage feel irritated with adverts and the incursions they place on their time. One in four, meanwhile, find advertising extremely intrusive, while one in two believe it is somewhat disruptive. A shocking 99% of Generation Z consumers have admitted to frequently skipping ads and nearly two-thirds (63%) use ad blockers to avoid online adverts.

The question arises, are we at the peak of traditional advertising, have we already peaked? Marketing mixes have shifted towards leveraging human voices as a source of trust and valuable experiences as a source of ‘realness’. Are we at said peak, will we always be known as the the ‘advertisee’ generation, ‘those who saw a million adverts’.

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