This wasn’t surprising. We have already pointed out that books and studies show that such a person does not exist. And as we have tried to explain, no single number is meaningful.
The number of ads you see depends on where you live – in a town or big city, your travel patterns – whether you commute and use public transport – what your habits are – whether you use social media or other forms of media, your age and other factors.
market price
For example, imagine a young commuter in a big city who uses a lot of social media and listens to and watches a lot of radio and TV.
For example, your exposure to advertising will be completely different from an older person living in a small town who does not use social media and whose other media habits are listening to BBC radio.
In an online world filled with surveillance advertising, we suspect that some media companies probably have a very astute notion of what different audiences consume in terms of advertising. But they don’t say.
Is it so inconceivable that some of us are actually exposed to thousands of commercial messages a day?
Many years ago, long before the current abundance of advertising on social media platforms, online, on public transport and on the streets, one of us, Andrew, conducted a personal experiment.
scramble
We try to count all the advertising messages we see in a 24-hour period through radio, television, newspapers, magazines, and billboards in public places.
At the time, the average number of views on weekdays was 454, and suspicions were raised that the number would be higher on weekends when ‘legacy’ media such as Sunday newspapers are consumed.
But that was before smartphones and social media. For example, during 20 seconds of still scrolling through a photo-based app (actually while responding to a query from the aforementioned radio study), we counted 22 ads.
The average daily smartphone use in the UK in 2020 was 4 hours and 14 minutes. in an upward trend. If you were exposed to ads at the same hit rate as photo-based apps, you could be exposed to over 16,000 ads, which is more than the common estimate of up to 10,000 based on average phone usage alone.
Studies have also shown that these photo-based apps affect the brain by messing with it. The less rational ‘buy something’ state..
emotional
Of course, this is before you turn on the TV or radio, open a magazine, walk down the street, or take public transportation.
When you watch an English Premier League soccer match on TV, you will see the betting company logo every 16 seconds, or 337 times. in a 90 minute match.
This does not include all the shirt and stadium side advertising for airlines and other items such as SUVs. Considering the prevalence of these advertisements, this could easily be equal to the frequency with which we see betting company logos.
It is important to point out that effective commercial messages do not rely on fully formed advertisements with lengthy text or voiceovers. It is a mistake to think that you have to consciously read and process advertising for it to be effective.
Logo recognition, and unconscious logo recognition, is enough to trigger an emotional response, associations that align the brand with certain activities and behaviors, such as extreme sports and the energy drink Red Bull.
Misbehavior
A viewer’s ‘dwell’ time in front of an ad may only be a few seconds. The advertising industry is experimenting with short advertisements of about 2 seconds, and the message is Even 1 second faster.
But it is clear that images and sounds can often be read and registered much faster than that by the unconscious minds that advertisers most want to reach.
Familiar songs can be identified by the brain As fast as 0.1~0.3 seconds. This is why many major brands have an ‘audio logo’ – a little tune that plays to announce their presence.
This is a form of audio branding and marketing, meaning marketers only need sounds that make users not only think of the brand but also become familiar with it. Control the way you think about it by associating a certain personality with it.
The human brain can extract meaning from images much faster. Under laboratory conditions, the following was found: This can happen When people are shown 6 to 12 mixed images at a rate of 0.013 seconds per image.
brain
The power of brands using visual and auditory logos is that they convey complex associations, meanings formed through repetition over time.
Then we can’t help but react somehow, just like hearing the opening of a famous pop song. We have no choice but to play ourselves.
This raises the question of what actually constitutes an ad, and therefore how can we calculate exposure to an ad? If our brains unconsciously react to auditory stimuli in 0.1 seconds and images to popular responses in 0.013 seconds, this means that every time we are exposed to a visual or auditory logo, there is some kind of commercial message going on.
We are advertised. And it happens all the time and much more often than we realize.
Your brain may register the McDonalds, KFC, Nike, Shell or BP logo several times a day and absorb the brand values and associated, standardized lifestyle without your conscious brain being aware of it.
highest
It’s a bit like building a secret den in your basement where all sorts of things can happen under your roof without you consciously knowing.
We talk elsewhere about how early children recognize logos and how brand identities put pressure on them to conform to their industry at a very young age.
In this way, in a culture steeped in commercial messages, we early induce and normalize those brands and what they represent (from fast food to fast fashion to highly polluting life choices) and then continually reinforce them. .
Now consider the media paint pot we live in every day. According to figures from industry data analyst PQ Media: Time spent with the media By 2022, consumers will spend less than eight hours a day.
But averages mask some pretty big differences. For example, Japan had the highest average daily media usage in 2022, at over 12 hours. The UK was third highest It takes about 10 hours or more, and the United States ranks 4th.
induction
In the same year, and again on global average, more than half of media were supported by advertising. In the United States, approximately every hour of prime-time TV The quarter consists of advertising.
American adults watch about three hours of TV per day. 45 minutes of watching TV commercials. Ad lengths vary, but ads tend to be shorter in the United States. 15 second ads are common.
This translates to 180 commercials during three hours of TV viewing, not including the ubiquitous product placement within the programs themselves.
The widespread adoption of digital displays in public spaces has significantly increased the number of advertisements you may be exposed to while moving around your urban environment.
Multiple ads can appear in spaces where only one person previously sat for days or weeks. We’ve also found that digital sites that offer video tend to: elicits a stronger response More than static.
commuting
In an experiment a few years ago where a Guardian journalist wore Google Glasses, he watched for 90 minutes. Exposure to over 250 different advertising messagesIncludes over 100 different brands in a wide variety of formats.
And this is largely a throwback to the pre-digital screen era when it comes to what is accessible on the London Underground network.
The journalist in question had little conscious recollection of such advertisements, so he assumed they had ‘little or no impact’.
But as we have seen, the brain is actively absorbing and processing all kinds of messages that the conscious brain is not aware of.
Fast forward almost 20 years and many of the advertising screens on the London Underground have gone digital, increasing the number and impact of the ads you see during your commute.
exposed
Many escalators pass by billboards lining both sides. At Angel station on the Northern Line, one of the deepest stations, a single escalator passes 88, 44 on each side.
Add in walking the hallways, along the platforms, and sitting on the subway train itself, and you could easily be exposed to 300 to 500 ads in one commute. advertisement Add it all up.
Arno Petr He is a professor of neuromarketing at Université Catholique de Lille and runs a consumer neuroscience consulting firm called Brain Impact.
In 2007 he wrote: “Imagine considering advertising in a very broad sense, including clearly identifiable logos on sponsorships, product placement in movies, billboards and storefronts, drinks vending machine advertising, displays and other displays in stores, clothing, etc. Then we will be exposed to the following environment: 15,000 commercial stimuli per day and per person.”
What does all this mean? As I said in the first edition, there is no official or single figure that can point to how many ads people are exposed to every day.
positive
However, the figure of 10,000 per day mentioned above seems reasonable and may underestimate the total amount of conditioning that heavy media consumers experience through exposure to commercial messages.
in bad advertising We look at how it is possible to end the worst polluting kinds of advertising, reduce advertising intrusion and visual pollution, and give examples of several major cities that have introduced cigarette style bans.
The Hague, Netherlands, for example, recently became one of the first to adopt it. Legal ban on all high-carbon advertising Across town. Previously, municipal bans only affected outlets directly controlled by authorities, such as billboards on publicly owned sites.
Now other cities, such as Edinburgh in Scotland, are also implementing strong policies. We also believe that exploring different ways in which media and news operations can thrive without advertising, and reducing brain pollution from advertising, can benefit both quality of life and long-term life chances.
Making childhood ad-free is one positive step to turn the tide on harmful overconsumption before a surge in global heating overwhelms us all.
author
Andrew Simms is co-director. new meteorological laboratoryco-founder bad advertising campaigncoordinator Rapid Transition AllianceHe is the author of Neuroeconomics and Green Economics and co-author of the original Green New Deal. continue X @AndrewSimms_uk Or a mastodon. @andrewsimms@indieweb.social.
Leo Murray co-founded the climate action charity Possible, where he currently serves as Innovation Director, and has also worked for 2000s direct action pressure group Plane Stupid and pioneering solar rail company Riding Sunbeams. continue X @crisortunity.
