It comes as no surprise that we are exposed to a HUGE number of ads everyday. I am still amazed at how many people complain about ads on their FREE web services, as if all that work is done for free just so they have someplace to go online and bitch about advertising, or worse, spread rumors that some service will start (heaven forbid) charging them to use this service or that. I digress however.
The number of ads each of us are exposed to every day has skyrocketed over the years. A number that is widely used today is we are each exposed to over 3,000 ad messages a day. Everything from online ads to radio ads, television spots to billboards, newspaper ads to opt-in emails, ads on Facebook and ads on Google search….you name it, there are probably ads involved in it. We are even exposed to product placements in TV shows and movies, where marketers pay to put their product in the storylines.
Totaled up, we are exposed to some 5 trillion impressions a year. How much is too much? Asking people if they like advertising is akin to asking people if they like taxes. In a perfect world we would like to never see either. It costs money to fight wars and build roads. It costs money to keep a service like Facebook going. It costs money for Google to search and index the internet. It costs money to provide drinking water, police and firefighters. Hence we will always have advertising and taxes.
This infographic from Upstream goes into some detail the deluge of advertising we face everyday and how we feel about it
