This was not surprising: we had already pointed out in the book and in our correspondence with the research that no such figure exists, and, as we tried to explain, a single figure would not make sense.
The number of ads you see can vary depending on where you live (village or big city), your travel patterns (e.g. commuting to work or taking public transport), your habits (are you a frequent user of social media or other media), your age and other factors.
street
For example, imagine a young commuter in a big city who is a heavy user of social media and who listens to and watches a lot of radio and television.
Their exposure to advertising will be very different to, say, an older person living in a small village who has no social media presence and whose other media habits are mainly centred around listening to BBC Radio.
In an online world increasingly saturated with surveillance advertising, I suspect some media companies have a very keen awareness of what different audiences are consuming in terms of advertising, but they’re not saying it.
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 deluge of advertising on social media platforms, online and on digital displays on public transport and in the streets, one of us, Andrew, ran his own experiment.
scramble
It seeks to count all the advertising messages we see in a 24-hour period through radio, television, newspapers, magazines, billboards in public places, and more.
At the time, the average readership on weekdays was 454, but some speculate that the number may be even higher on weekends, when consumption of “traditional” media such as Sunday newspapers is higher.
But that was before smartphones and social media: For example, I counted 22 ads while mindlessly scrolling through an image-based app for 20 seconds (actually, while answering the radio survey questions mentioned above).
The average daily smartphone usage time in the UK in 2020 was 4 hours and 14 minutes, On the riseIf you were exposed to ads at the same hit rate as the image-based app, you would be exposed to over 16,000 ads just from using an average mobile phone — significantly more than the commonly held and unsubstantiated estimate of up to 10,000 that’s in circulation.
There is also research suggesting that these image-based apps may affect the brain. The state of “buying something” that is not very rational.
Emotional
Of course, this was before we ever turned on the TV or radio, opened a magazine, walked down the street or got on public transport.
If you watch an English Premier League soccer match on television, you’ll see a betting company’s logo every 16 seconds – 337 times. In a 90 minute match.
This doesn’t include shirt or pitchside advertising for other things like airlines or SUVs, but given their prevalence, they could easily rival how often you see a betting company’s logo.
It is important to point out that effective commercial messages do not rely on full advertisements with long texts or narration. It is a mistake to think that you need to consciously read and understand an advertisement to be effective.
Logo recognition, even subconscious logo recognition, is enough to evoke an emotional response, to associate a brand with certain activities (such as the energy drink Red Bull and extreme sports) and behaviors.
Laboratory
Audiences may only linger in front of an ad for a few seconds. The advertising industry is experimenting with ads as short as two seconds, recognizing that a message can be remembered in that short a time. About 1 second faster.
But it is clear that images and sounds can be read and recorded subconsciously, and can reach advertisers where they most want to reach them much more quickly.
Your brain can identify familiar songs In 0.1 to 0.3 secondsFor this reason, many big brands have adopted “audio logos” – little sounds that play to announce their presence.
It’s a form of audio branding and marketing, where marketers don’t just make their brand relatable; Controlling Your Mindset You understand it by associating a particular personality with it.
The human brain can make sense of images much faster. In a laboratory setting, This can happen People were shown 6 to 12 mixed images in succession at a rate of 0.013 seconds per image.
brain
The power of brands that use visual and sonic logos is that they are full of meaning and have complex associations that have been established repeatedly over time.
And just like hearing the opening of a great pop song, we can’t help but respond in some way. We can’t help but be played.
This raises the question of what exactly constitutes advertising and how to count exposure to it: if our brains subconsciously react to auditory stimuli in 0.1 seconds and to images in 0.013 seconds, then every exposure to a visual or acoustic logo is sending out a commercial message.
We are being promoted, and it happens all the time, and far more often than we realize.
How many times a day does your brain recognise the logos of McDonald’s, KFC, Nike, Shell and BP and unconsciously absorb the brand values and standardised lifestyle associated with them?
Best
It’s as if someone had built a secret hideout in the basement of your house, and all sorts of things could be happening under your roof without your conscious knowledge.
We’ve written elsewhere about how early children recognize logos and how brand identity creates peer pressure at an early age.
Thus, in a culture saturated with commercial messages, we have prematurely triggered, normalized, and then constantly reinforced such brands and what they represent (from fast food to fast fashion to heavily polluted lifestyle choices).
Now, think about the media paint pot we live in every day. According to figures from industry data analytics firm PQ Media: Time spent on media By 2022, consumers will be using it for just under eight hours per day.
But the averages hide big differences. For example, Japan’s average daily media usage time exceeded 12 hours in 2022, hitting a record high. The UK was third highest The United States came in fourth, with an estimated 10+ hours.
Pull out
In the same year, and as a global average, more than half of the media is supported by advertising. In the United States, about 1 million people spend every hour of primetime television. The quarter is made up of ads..
American adults watch about three hours of television per day, which is Watch 45 minutes of TV commercials. Advertisements vary in length, but in the US, shorter ads are trending. 15-second ads are common.
This equates to 180 advertisements per three hours of television, excluding product placements scattered throughout the show.
The prevalence of digital displays in public places has dramatically increased the number of advertisements we see when simply moving around an urban environment.
Multiple ads can now run in spaces where previously only one ad would run for days or weeks at a time. Elicit a stronger response Rather than static.
commute
A few years ago, a reporter from The Guardian tried out Google Glass and after 90 minutes Encounter 250 different advertising messagesThere are over 100 different brands available in a variety of formats.
In terms of what you’ll encounter on the London Underground network, this is largely a story from the pre-digital screen era.
The journalist in question had little conscious recollection of those ads, and so surmised they “had little or no impact.”
But as we have seen, the brain actively absorbs and processes all kinds of messages that our conscious brain is not aware of.
Nearly two decades later, many of the advertising screens on the London Underground have gone digital, increasing the number and impact of advertising you see on your commute.
Exposure
On many escalators you walk past rows of advertising billboards on either side. At one of the most remote stations, Angel on the Northern Line, one escalator carries you past 88 billboards, 44 on each side.
If you add in the ads you see while walking down the hallways, on the platform, and on the subway train, you could easily encounter 300-500 ads on your round-trip commute. It all adds up.
Arnaud Petre He is a professor of neuromarketing at the Catholic University of Lille and also runs the consumer neuroscience consulting firm Brain Impact.
“If we take advertising in a very broad sense,” he wrote in 2007, “to include sponsorship, product placement in films, advertising on billboards, in-store and other displays, and clearly identifiable logos on clothing, then we can assume that we are at least 15,000 commercial incentives per day.”
What does this mean? As we said in the first edition, there is no official figure or single figure that tells us how much advertising people are exposed to every day.
positive
However, the 10,000 per day figure stated above seems reasonable and may underestimate the total amount of conditioning that high media consumers experience through exposure to commercial messages.
in Bad ads It looks at how to eliminate the worst and most polluting advertising and reduce its intrusion and visual pollution, and gives examples of tobacco-like bans being introduced in several major cities.
For example, The Hague in the Netherlands recently A legal ban on all high-carbon advertising Until now, the city’s ban only applied to storefronts under the direct control of authorities, such as signs on public property.
Other cities, such as Edinburgh in Scotland, have now implemented strong policies. We will also look at the different ways in which media and news businesses can thrive without advertising, and the benefits that reducing brain pollution from advertising can bring to both your quality of life and your long-term life chances.
Ensuring an ad-free childhood is a positive step towards turning the tide on harmful over-consumption before the tides of global warming overwhelm us all.
author
Andrew Sims: New Weather InstituteCo-founder of Malicious advertising campaigns,coordinator Rapid Transition Allianceauthor of The New Green Economy and co-author of The Green New Deal. X Follow Or Mastodon. @andrewsimms@indieweb.social.
Leo Murray is a co-founder of the climate change charity Possible, where he is now director of innovation, as well as founder of the 2000s direct action pressure group Plane Stoopid and pioneering solar-powered railway company Riding Sunbeams. X thank you.
