How many ads do you see?

This was no surprise. We’d already pointed out in the book and in correspondence with the research that no such figure existed. And, as we tried to explain, any single figure would be meaningless. 

The number of adverts you see will vary hugely depending on: where you live – in a village or a big city, what your travel patterns are – such as if you commute and use public transport, what your habits are – whether you use social and other forms of media a lot, your age and other factors.

Streets

For example, imagine a young commuter in a big city who is also a heavy user of social media and listens to, and watches, a lot of radio and TV. 

Their exposure to advertising will be entirely different to, for example, an elderly person living in a small village who is not on social media and whose other media habits might largely orbit listening to BBC radio.

In an increasingly online world full of surveillance advertising we suspect that several media companies probably do have a very shrewd notion of what different audiences consume in terms of advertising. But they’re not saying.

Is it so unthinkable that some of us are indeed exposed to thousands of commercial messages in a day?

Many years ago, long before the current volume of advertising on social media platforms, online and on digital displays on public transport and in the streets, one of us, Andrew, conducted his own personal experiment. 

Scrambles

Trying to count every advertising message encountered in a 24 hour period via radio, television, newspapers, magazines and in public spaces on billboards. 

On that occasion, on an average weekday the number reached was 454, with the suspicion that it would be higher at the weekend when more ‘heritage’ media like Sunday papers get consumed. 

But that was before smart phones and social media. As an example, in a 20 second spell idly scrolling on a picture-based app while (in fact responding to a query from the aforementioned radio research), we counted 22 adverts.

Average daily smart phone usage in the UK was 4 hours and 14 minutes in 2020, and on a rising trend. If you were exposed to adverts at the same hit rate as on that picture-based app, average phone use alone could expose you to over 16,000 adverts, rather more than the unfounded general estimate in circulation of up to 10,000. 

There is also research suggesting that such picture based apps have an effect on the brain that scrambles it into a less rational ‘buy something’ state.

Emotional

This, of course, is before you even turn the TV or radio on, open a magazine, walk down the street or travel on public transport. 

Watch an English premier league football match on TV and you get exposed to a betting company logo every 16 seconds, or 337 times in a 90 minute game. 

This doesn’t count all the shirt and pitch side adverts for other things like airlines and SUVs which, given their prevalence could easily equal the frequency of seeing betting company logos.

It’s important to point out that effective commercial messaging does not rely on fully constructed adverts with lengthy text or voice overs. It would be a mistake to think that you have to consciously read and process an advert for it to have an effect. 

Logo recognition, and unconscious logo recognition at that, is enough to trigger emotional responses, associations where brands have aligned themselves with specific activities – like energy drink Red Bull with extreme sports – and behaviours.

Laboratory

The ‘dwell’ time of viewers in front of adverts may only be a few seconds. The advertising industry is experimenting with adverts as short as two seconds, and is aware that a message can be registered in as quickly as a second. 

But it’s clear that images and sounds can be read and registered by the unconscious mind, often where advertisers would like most to reach, much quicker even than that.

Familiar tunes can be identified by the brain as quickly 0.1 to 0.3 seconds. This is why many major brands have ‘audio logos’ – those little tunes that play to announce their presence. 

It is form of audio branding and marketing that means marketers need only a sound, made familiar, to make you not just to think of a brand, but control how you think about it by associating a certain personality to it. 

The human brain can extract the meaning of an image even faster. Under laboratory conditions it has been shown that this can happen when people are shown a series of 6-12 mixed images at the rate of 0.013 seconds per image.

Brain

The power of brands that use visual and sonic logos is that they carry meanings, complex associations that have been established through repetition over time. 

Then, like hearing the opening of a pop music classic, we can’t but help respond somehow. We can’t help being played ourselves. 

This raises the question of what actually constitutes an advert, and therefore how we might count our exposure to them? If our brains unconsciously respond to aural triggers in 0.1 seconds, and images in 0.013 seconds popular – that means that every time we’re exposed to a visual or sonic logo some kind of commercial messaging is going on. 

We are being advertised at. And, it is happening all the time and much more often than we are aware of. 

How many times in a day might your brain register a McDonalds, KFC, Nike, Shell or BP logo – and absorb the brand values and associated, normalised lifestyles without your conscious brain being aware.

Highest

It’s a bit like someone building a secret den in a cellar beneath your house where all kinds of things may happen under your roof without you consciously knowing anything about it.

We mention elsewhere how early logo recognition occurs in children, and how brand identities also create peer pressure to conform at very young ages. 

In this way, being in a culture drenched in commercial messaging, we have such brands and what they represent – everything from fast food to fast fashion and heavily polluting life choices – induced and normalised early, and then constantly reinforced.

Now, consider the media paint pot in which we live, day in, day out. Figures from industry data analysts PQ Media put the average amount of time spent with media by consumers in 2022 at just under eight hours per day.

But averages mask some pretty big differences. Japan, for example, recorded the highest average daily media use in 2022 at over 12 hours, the UK was third highest with an estimated 10 hours or more and the US fourth.

Elicit

For that same year, and again as a global average, over half of the media is supported by adverts. In the US of every hour of prime time TV about a quarter is made up of adverts. 

Adults in the US watch around three hours of TV per day, meaning about 45 minutes watching TV commercials.  The length of adverts varies but in the US the trend has been toward shorter ads with 15 second adverts being common. 

That would translate to 180 adverts for a three hour TV sitting – not including ubiquitous product placement within the programmes themselves.

The increasing prevalence of digital displays in public places has significantly raised the number of adverts you could be exposed to while just moving around the urban environment.

Multiple adverts can be shown in the space where formerly only one would sit for days or weeks. It’s also been shown that digital sites, which offer moving images, tend to elicit more powerful responses than static ones.

Commuting

An experiment by a Guardian journalist a few years ago wearing a pair of Google glasses revealed that in a 90-minute period he was exposed to 250 different advertising messages, including over 100 different brands in large variety of formats.  

And this was back in a largely pre-digital screen era in terms of what you might encounter on the London underground transport network.

Because the journalist in question could barely recall consciously any of those adverts, he assumed that they had ‘little or no impact’. 

But, as we’ve seen, the brain is actively absorbing and processing all kinds of messages that the conscious brain is oblivious to. 

Jump forward nearly two decades and many of the ad screens on the London Underground have gone digital increasing the number and impact of adverts you’re exposed to while commuting.

Exposed

On many of the escalators you move through a gauntlet of ad billboards either side. In one of the deepest stations, Angel on the Northern line, you pass 88 such hoardings on a single escalator, 44 either side. 

Add the ones you then see walking through corridors, along platforms and sat in the tube train itself, and it is possible that on a single commute, there and back, you could easily be exposed to somewhere between 300 – 500 adverts. The ads all add up.

Arnaud Pêtre is a professor of neuromarketing at the Université Catholique de Lille and also runs a consultancy on consumer neuroscience called Brain Impact. 

In 2007 he wrote, “imagine that we consider advertising in a very broad sense, including sponsorship, product placement in films, signs and store fronts, advertisements on drinks machines, displays and other displays in stores, logos clearly identifiable on clothing etc., we would then be exposed to no less than 15,000 commercial stimuli per day and per person.”

What does this all amount to? As we said in our first edition, there is no official or single figure that you can point to for how many adverts people are exposed to everyday.

Positive

But the 10,000 per day mentioned above seems reasonable – and could well underestimate the total volume of conditioning that people with high media consumption experience through exposure to commercial messaging.

In Badvertising we look at how it is possible to end the worst, most polluting kinds of advertising, reduce its intrusion and visual pollution, and give examples of multiple major cities introducing tobacco style bans. 

For example, The Hague in the Netherlands recently became the first place to introduce a ban by law for all high carbon advertising across the city. Previously municipal bans have only affected outlets directly controlled by authorities, such billboards on publicly owned sites. 

Now other cities like Edinburgh in Scotland have strong policies in place too. We also go into a range of ways that the media and news operations can thrive without advertising, and benefits for both quality of life and our long term life chances that reducing the brain pollution from adverts can bring. 

Making childhood more of an ad-free environment is one positive step to turning the tide on toxic overconsumption, before the rising tides of a heating planet overwhelm us all.

The Authors

Andrew Simms is co-director of the New Weather Institute, co-founder of the Badvertising campaign, coordinator of the Rapid Transition Alliance, an author on new and green economics, and co-author of the original Green New Deal. Follow on X @AndrewSimms_uk or Mastodon. @andrewsimms@indieweb.social.

Leo Murray co-founded climate action charity Possible, where he is currently director of innovation, as well as noughties direct action pressure group Plane Stupid and pioneering solar rail enterprise Riding Sunbeams. Follow on X @crisortunity.