I’m working thru a marketing cert via Google rn (working with the enemy) and I just learned how many ads we’re exposed to on a daily basis!
Any guesses?
Tap for spoiler
4000-10000
ads per day !!!
I can say with confidence, if they use the phone more than five hours a day and they actively go outside grocery store, convenience store, movie theater, or in a public outing, they see at least 100 ads per day.
I have DNScrypt with built in adblockers, I download my media and don’t watch television through cable, nor do i have subscription based streaming platforms. I go some days not seeing 1 ad
What is being counted as an ad for these things? Is branding slapped on a product an ad? If a car with a company logo drives by my window, is that an ad?
I’m in a similar ad boat to you in that I actively removed most ads from my life. I work remotely and often go a full day without going to a commercial venue. I still see a lot of things that could be classed as ads
As a random example, I just looked at my key chain. My car key has a Ford logo. The key chain was a freebie from a now long-defunct car dealership with their logo. I have a light on it sold by Battery Junction and manufactured by Titanium, with both logos prominently displayed. One of my keys was cut by a local locksmith with their name engraved on it. This could be considered as exposing me to 5 separate ads just on my key chain
To get a figure in the thousands, they probably have a very inclusive definition of an ad. I’m sure we’re exposed to more ads than we realize
Seeing a logo isn’t an ad. It’s a symbol to represent the brand but it isn’t a commercial or direct business effort to get you to become a customer (buyer of, purchaser of, consumer of) that brand. It is only the placeholder for the name of the brand for quicker identification of what the company/business/product is.
This is an incredibly naïve understanding of how branding and human cognition work. To claim a corporate logo is a “neutral placeholder” is to ignore the entire multi-trillion dollar industry of marketing and the last century of psychological research.
A logo is not a “placeholder” but instead it’s the visual distillation of a brand’s entire propaganda campaign.
Every commercial, billboard, and sponsored post you’ve ever seen for that brand has worked to create a subconscious association between that symbol and a set of feelings, aspirations, or identities (Nike = “achievement”, Coca Cola = “taste”, Apple = “innovation/creativity”, and whatever other crap). Seeing the logo fires that neural pathway without the “prerequisite” for a full ad. The commercial already happened in our heads, across years. And it still constantly does under capitalism, hence commodity fetishism is a thing.
The primary goal of all advertising is not to make you buy something right now, but to ensure their brand is the first one you think of when you have a need. A logo constantly flashing in your visual field does exactly that. It’s a maintenance ad, whether deliberate or not, keeping the brand’s presence active in your subconsciousness.
It is a territorial claim on mental space, and by arguing that their symbols have a right to exist in our public and digital spaces “just for identification,” corporations are claiming a right to permanent, free real estate in our minds.
It’s almost like calling a national flag of any country “just a piece of colored cloth” because it ignores the immense weight of symbolic meaning, cultural conditioning, and ideological power that whatever given symbol carries. In this case, it’s a flag that flies not for a nation or people but for the empire of capital. Even if it was a defunct company, it still once served this purpose, even if now “retired.”
i likewise don’t see many adds thanks to various forms of adblockers and now they feel repetitive and annoying each time i trapped somehow; sometimes so offputtingly so that i stop consuming the media.
I consider “branding” adds so easily a thousand just in a trip through the store. Driving is mostly just political posters and of course signage (again branding -> ads). The drive is always about 30 minutes so if with radio easily 10 minutes of ads. If on social media more ads in between posts. Clothing can be ads both the free shirts part of campaigns or branded stuff.
With in my own home most gadget or appliance stuff is branded. Anything processed, again branded.
Honestly if I wasn’t so opposed to it my life would probably be worse, but I prefer buying from people (they just give you a bar of soap, peaches, chair, etc no logo or stamp on it), a block everything I can, and like diy electronics.
It
I get unreasonably upset with the fact there are so many product categories where you can’t buy a product without the brand name/logo slapped on it in a visible position.
I’m paying for the product, I don’t want to become your walking advertisement, nor do I automatically endorse your brand.
If you say digital ads, probably none.
But we have ads everywhere, brands and logos are everywhere, this is ad too.
I get my earphones I see their logo, I get my phone I see a logo too, my laptop, my shoes, my shirts etc… Ads everywhere.
i tend to remove logos from all my shit for this very reason. i hate ugly logos so much.
Zero but I’m neither average nor American.
The odds of that are very near zero. They’re including things like brand names and logos as ads. The Lemmy logo itself would be considered an ad
They’re not getting numbers in the thousands by only including intrusive ads
That’s rather silly. Might as well include road signs “advertising” places to go and how far away they are.
Well yeah signs that give the direction to the nearest restaurant or to a shop would be an add really
Jokes on you, there are ads as posts on lemmy.
Bots are everywhere.
I’ll see 3-5 digital ads, on my phone at lunch in 20 mins, everything else is 100% ad free. I grew up with 80s tv commercials, nothing affects me now, lol, I also haven’t had cable in, woah, 25 years Also not from the states
Are there no billboards where you live? Do businesses not advertise their services there? Do you just stay inside with your eyes closed while being either above or below average?
I live in the countryside. You know, that place with all the green.
One every 6 seconds? I call bullshit. Or are ya all driving a F1 race?
I can believe this.
Every time I need to use a system with no protection, I am shocked by how many ads are fucking everywhere.
6 seconds is more time that it takes to go through a Google search, or to scroll through a screenful or two of social media. You can see a dozen ads in 6 seconds if you’re not using any kind of ad blockers.
Well okay I do see your point, but don’t you think the article confounds “sees” with “are exposed to”?
I did the math myself assuming seven hours of sleep and the higher estimate of 10 000 ads - yup, one every 6.12 seconds.
If an add lasts more than six seconds you would start lagging behind. Then again, I guess some people consume multiple adds at once.
With seven hours of sleep and 4000 every day we’re down to one ad every 15 seconds. Still seems wild even by American standards.
I suspect Google have been manipulating data in order to convinse buyers of the efficiency of their ad selling business, and this is the result of flipping these data back to society.
Boy idk, with my pihole I can see all the places where ads are supposed to be on articles and stuff and there are a freakin ton of breaks and funky formatting.
That’s not including highlighted word ads, video ads at the top and sides of the screen (especially the ones that follow you) and sponsored results in every search (Google, Amazon, etc.). The top result bar of the main used search engine, Google, shows you an entire scrollable row of related product ads, followed by another block of ad links after. When you buy things online, there’s often a pop up about related products or things you might like before you check out, which is 6-12 more ads. That’s not including the multiple ads that may already be present on each product page.
I can’t comment on social media sites in depth, but there they likely have static ads in addition to volumes of sponsored posts, plus a solid chunk of the “content” is also advertising.
Does this include real life and not just the internet? Radio ads, gas pump ads, billboards, ticker messages and printing on vehicles are all ads as well. Oh, and all the clothing with logos.
I absolutely believe 4,000-10,000 for an average person without blockers who uses normal sites. Video ads probably make up a relatively small proportion but ads are -everywhere-.
Take radio ads - if they last 10 seconds each and you listen to the radio non-stop all day, 2/3rd of the content on the radio would have to be ads. If they play 2 minutes of pop music for every 30 seconds of ads you just can’t reach these numbers.
It’s true that you can get several ads all at once online, I just still find it hard to believe one could reach 10 000 in a day without basically making an effort. At least in terms of visible ads - trackers is another thing.
But maybe I’m just out of touch. Recently I generally forget to install ad blockers because I have pretty much stopped using the majority of the web.
If you take each medium in isolation, no you can’t reach those numbers.
But for a whole day across all the various ways advertisers have found to shove shit in our faces? I just think you might be under-estimating how many ads are out there, or maybe not considering all the things that count as ads, especially in meatspace, and how little most people actually do to avoid them, if they can even be avoided.
Like that 30 seconds for every 2 minutes of music is often while driving and seeing billboards and vehicle advertisements and stuff as well.
I’m European and I only went to the US this year (first and last time), and it’s true I was weirded out by the amount of billboards. But still, the same billboard usually stays within your line of vision for a little while.
And if they really count it in such a crazy way by knowing what’s in everyones field of vision all the time, that’s a crazy approximation from their side.
I think it’s likely they instead measure how mamy ads come through the web to your device, which is different from how many you actually see. Like an ad at the bottom of a website you don’t scroll through and stuff like that.
The only ads I really see are product placements, brand names/logos and product reviews on youtube (which are generally paid ads).
Like many here, I use ad blockers etc but I don’t think most people realize how much of what they see are actually ads. Just look at a pair of sneakers and you’re likely to see an ad on the side of them.
Me (uses discord and lemmy, rarely watches youtube and adblocks browser and youtube) online: 20 or so (counting Netflix ads), real-life: 1000 (half of them old).
Fuckin loads.
Not American but can’t imagine they see fewer.
Very few. My home internet is adblocked with multiple layers. I don’t frequent ad-filled social media. I don’t watch TV much. Probably the most ads I’d get are if I’m driving, then I’ll get billboards and the like.
I still see and hear occasional traditional ads, as they’re hard to avoid in public spaces or in my snail-mail box, but I don’t see online advertising since I adblock and spam-filter very aggressively. If a site is tries to anti-adblock (like Twitch) I just stop using them.
I don’t think my “daily seen” number ever gets to three digits.
So many people don’t read the most obvious “no entry” signs. I don’t think they’ll notice most advertising.
I wonder if signs have become less effective as a result of advertising. Have people become desensitized to things trying to grab their attention?
I gotta wonder what they’re counting as an impression. How much is junk mail/email spam, for instance? How much is fully peripheral - billboards you’re not stopping to read, ambient Internet banner ads you’re deliberately ignoring or clicking through? Native ads people simple don’t clock or understand?
I also have to wonder how many of these ads “stick” in anyone’s brain. It seems like exposure at that volume would make retaining any individual impression unlikely.
Every bannor ad on a webpage is one ad. A news article can have 12 or more.
There are ads on news articles?
That’s insane! It also seems like a figure of diminishing of returns. If your company puts out the only ad out there, that will be incredibly effective. But one in 4K? Does it really make a difference?
But one in 4K? Does it really make a difference?
I bet the better resolution helps
