You’ve seen this number before: an average American consumer today is exposed to — or “bombarded by”, or “inundated with” — 5,000 advertising messages a day. This number finds its way into slide decks, it peppers newspaper articles, and it is quoted in academic papers.
You probably used it at least once. I know I did. Only today, I realized I had no idea where this number was coming from.
Complaints about advertising clutter date back at least as far as 1759, when Samuel Johnson wrote, “Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic.”
So, apparently the clutter problem isn’t new and it’s not getting any better, but why 5,000? Whether this number is even plausible will be the topic of another post. The problem at hand is that the number by now has acquired a status of an urban myth — whoever talks about it references “a study” or “an analyst”, and its reliability varies from it being “an estimate” to a self-evident fact. Yet, after a few diligent hours, I couldn’t find any methodology or a specific source behind whatever studies had arrived at the conclusion. What I found, though, is that the 5,000 number had mutated into all sorts of weird shapes.
So, where does it come from? Here’s what I got so far.
NY Times, 1988: “Studies show that the typical consumer is bombarded by 5,000 advertising messages a day.”
Journal of Advertising Research, 1998: “Americans are exposed to over 500 commercial messages a day (Bovee and Arens, 1995).” Apparently, the author is referring to this old textbook. This number doesn’t seem to be a typo; another researcher on the same quest quotes a subsequent 1999 edition of the text book estimating the range to be within 500-1,000 messages.
The only solid but not very helpful number is in this press release from 2000: “Jupiter forecasts that by 2005, consumers will be exposed to 950 impressions online per usage day, more than doubling from 440 impressions in 1999.”
In 2004, J. Walker Smith, the CEO of the research company Yankelovich Partners, gave a speech to ANA in which he described the findings of a recent study his company had just finished. This February 2004 study measured people’s attitudes towards advertising and how it had changed since the last similar probe in 1961 (it had worsened, predictably). Here’s a write-up on ClickZ (2004) and a pdf of the press release (April 15, 2004) that outlines the core findings.
Neither the ClickZ article nor the press release say anything about ad clutter measurements being the focus of the study. The press release is full of all kinds of gloomy numbers, but while Smith does address the ad clutter problem, he offers no specifics.
Now check out these press quotes that would reference the study in the years to follow.
Inc.com in 2005: “On average, Americans are subject to some 3,000 essentially random pitches per day. Two-thirds of people surveyed in a Yankelovich Partners study said they feel “constantly bombarded” by ads, and 59% said the ads they see have little or no relevance to them.”
On the other hand, Philip Kotler wrote the same year, “The average American is exposed to several hundred ad messages a day and is trying to tune out.” (Kellogg, 2005)
USA Today, 2006: “The average 1970s city dweller was exposed to 500 to 2,000 ad messages a day, [J.Walker] Smith says. Now, it’s 3,000 to 5,000.” Same quote on CBS News.
Magazine Engagement, 2006: “All this means that the average person now sees over 3,000 advertising messages a day.”
Another NY Times story, in 2007, again quotes Yankelovich: “Yankelovich, a market research firm, estimates that a person living in a city 30 years ago saw up to 2,000 ad messages a day, compared with up to 5,000 today.”
From there, the meme starts its journey through the blogosphere.
Buzz Builder blog, 2007, quotes the NY Times story that quotes Yankelovich: “The story mentions a recent Yankelovich study which estimates that a person living in a city 30 years ago saw up to 2,000 ad messages a day, compared with 5,000 today.”
Branding Communications blog, 2007: “Twenty-five years ago it was estimated that people were getting exposed to 1,500 messages per day. Now it’s estimated that this number is approximately 3000-4000 per day.” Also, “Message clutter could reach 5,000 per day by 2010.”
Other, undated sources:
Wensmedia (cached, undated): “Consumers are exposed to more than 3,600 advertising messages a day, including everything from packaging to signage, and from radio to billboards.”
Road Runner Ads, undated: “The average American is exposed to an astonishing 700 advertising messages per day.”
Canada Post, undated: “Canadian consumers are inundated with hundreds of advertising messages each day through a variety of media.”
Respond 2 Creative, undated: “Consider the facts. The average consumer is exposed to over 13,000 marketing messages per day.”
Business Encyclopedia on Answers.com, undated: “Advertising has so permeated everyday life that individuals can expect to be exposed to more than 1,200 different messages each day.”
Unnamed, undated: “One estimate holds that the typical person sees 2,700 advertising messages a day.”
So far, I have three leads: Yankelovich, the Contemporary Advertising (Bovee and Arens) text book, and David Shenk’s Data Smog. Updates will be posted as they come.
Ilya runs the R&D group and studies the relationships people build with different traditional and emerging media. 
Interesting start to an interesting project! Yankelovich is the firm I’ve seen referenced for the past 20 years — it would be useful to understand their method and reports over time. Of course, few people are interested in the “typical person.” Would be more interesting to understand segments like Gen Y or even enterprise titles, like CEO. I look forward to learning more.
Hi Ilya – why not keep a diary for a day to see where you get to? It would certainly be a challenge. Question is, what do you count as a message – any time you see a logo? Let me know and I’d be happy to collaborate…
Nice work Ilya.
I first saw the figure quoted in this Economist article from June 2004…
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2787854
Unusually for The Economist there is no attribution of the estimate…
“It has been calculated that the average American is subjected to some 3,000 advertising messages every day. If you add in everything from the badges on cars to slogans on sweatshirts, the ads in newspapers, on taxis, in subways and even playing on TVs in lifts, then some people could be exposed to more than that number just getting to the office. No wonder many consumers seem to be developing the knack of tuning-out adverts.”
However, Dawn Hudson of Pepsi Cola North America quoted the figure as the opening sentence to an Oct 2001 article in The Advertiser called “Cracking the Code” …
Again, no source.
“The average consumer is exposed to 3,000 different messages per day. That could mean more than 1,500 before lunch. Maybe it starts with the cup of coffee and the morning newspaper with its 150 offers, or the morning talk show with its dozens of commercials. Then on the way to work it’s the radio ads in the car or the billboards on the side of the road or even the bus or subway ads. Then after work, repeat the cycle.”
The figure appears in this presentation by TBWA:
http://tinyurl.com/36pqr2 (slide 7)
… and is also referenced in an article by the planner Russ Lidstone called “The need for brand humility” which he gave to the 2005 Market Research Society Annual Conference.
Both of these 2 sources attribute the figure to the 2000 FT book “Funky Business” by the Swedish academics Kjell A Nordström and Jonas Ridderstrål.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Funky-Business-Financial-Times-Nordstrom/dp/0273659073
However, the David Shenk Data Smog book you reference above looks like it precedes Funky Business:
“Shenk, in his book Data Smog, states that the average American
encountered 560 daily advertising messages in 1971. By 1997 that
number had increased to over 3,000 per day.”
From a very thorough Google Answer:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=56750
Peter, this is exactly what I’m planning to do. The challenge is to have my day be as close to the average is possible; on the one hand, my private media habits might differ from the norm, on the other hand, I probably see more ads because of where I work. But yes, I want to count the ads I see.
Thanks a lot, Lee. I did a Lexis Nexis search last night and went through the archives of the Journal of Advertising Research — no luck. The lack of proper attribution in the Economist’s article is surprising, too. That Google Answer was probably written by or copied from the site of Frank Baker on media literacy — he’s the one mentioned as “another researcher on a similar quest”. I knew it was an old list because of the link rot, but the Answer helps to date-stamp it more accurately. (http://www.frankwbaker.com/adsinaday.htm)
[...] Hill | Holliday » Blog Archive » The Elusive Advertising Clutter Complaints about ad clutter date back to 1759, when Samuel Johnson wrote: “Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises…” (tags: research ad clutter) [...]
[...] consumer is exposed to 5,000 ads a day?” I certainly have. Ilya has done a great job of digging up sources behind this popular (if debatable) [...]
[...] Advertising clutter is not new. In 1759, Samuel Johnson lamented “Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic.”. One response from the industry to fight clutter has been to find newer and newer ways to interrupt people. Neuro marketing, Pheromone Marketing, Headvertising, product placement in school report cards. An Australian woman is selling her pubic hair, promising to place an ad on a virtual page devoted to the sale. [...]
Hello. just found this place and followed the thread. Interesting topic that I may be able to contribute.
I have about 25k sports fans who I can send a txt msg to nearly every night. I can ask them how many THEY think they are exposed to. Would provide an interesting balance to what you guys are seeking, If your interested hit me at the email or stonefort@gmail.com
[...] consumer is exposed to 5,000 ads a day?” I certainly have. Ilya has done a great job of digging up sources behind this popular (if debatable) [...]
The barrage of advertising has had a cheapening affect on almost all advertising. It is more important than ever to stand out and advertise in mediums that consumers are not accustomed to ignoring. I also think that those of in charge of spending ad dollars need to be tighter with a penny. Despite the advent of Tivo, dvr’s, and hundreds of cable channels. The networks cost for a 30 second commercial has steadily risen every year despite smaller audiences.
I am biased but I think we have found that new medium, that is of course until they learn to tune us out as well. But that should take a year or two.
http://www.windowrent.com
“Advertise on the Rear Window of High Visibility Cars”
Advertising clutter is the single biggest problem with marketing. Not just today, but as long as advertising has been around. People are annoyed by ads that show up in unfamiliar places, but become used to them over time. So marketers respond by finding even more unfamiliar places. It’s cumulative and it’s getting worse. Yet, consumers can process no more information today than they could before, and perhaps even less. Multi-tasking is just a fancy word for paying little attention to many more things at once. If we really want to do good marketing, then we have to get out of the clutter business and stay solidly in the communication business. It’s tempting to try and address our challenges by adding more weight to our media buys, but this only raises the cost of doing advertising, and it never goes down in this arms race. We wind up in a place where it costs ever more to get the same old — and sometimes declining — response. Clutter is a fundamental problem for us.
So, the first question becomes one of the extent of this problem. In our work at Yankelovich we have relied on the work of others to quantify it. But it’s clear that there are many different opinions. As we stated in our book on this issue, Coming to Concurrence (2005), it’s important not to get too caught up in the exact numbers. Rather, just use the numbers to get a qualitative feel for the issue. Regrettably, reporters don’t have the space or inclination to include such qualifiers in their stories. But you don’t even have to use ad exposure numbers. You can just use marketing productivity estimates. Either way, you see the problem.
Still, it’s interesting to know how these ad exposure estimates are calculated. The oldest such estimate is the one cited by David Shenk in Data Smog. His figure comes from a figure cited in Alvin Toffler’s 1971 book Future Shock. Toffler’s figure came from a conference speech that cited a number calculated by Bill Moran for use in that speech (delivered by his boss) when he was running the research function at Y&R. I know this because I am a friend of Bill’s and he has related this story to me. Bill made a simple calculation. He simply conducted a thought exercise and went through the typical day for a typical person in a typical American big city in the 1960s. How many times would such a person be exposed to some sort of ad, logo or promotion? He came to around 500. It’s that simple, and that’s where this early figure comes from.
Note what is being calculated here. Not the number of ads people pay attention to, but the number of ads that people might pay attention to. It’s exposure opportunities. Obviously, we live lives nowadays in which ever more of the white space around us is crowded with ads. Thus, we have many more opportunities for ad exposure.
The sources of contemporary estimates are harder to pin down. The 1988 New York Times article cited by Ilya is the earliest one I’ve seen. The earliest one I could find for our research for Coming to Concurrence was a 1991 Business Week article written by reporter Mark Lander. Unfortunately, he references no original source. The best academic paper utilizing these day is a 1995 paper by Eli Noam entitled “Visions of the Media Age: Taming the Information Monster.” But it’s pretty easy to do the math in the same way that Bill Moran did it many decades ago. Marketing consultant Tom Eglehoff puts the relevant numbers on the table to do so in a blog he posted some years ago at SmallTownMarketing.com. You wind up with numbers in range of those cited today. In fact, if you want an even better understanding of the extent of contemporary clutter, I’d recommend the first chapter of Coming to Concurrence.
Anyhow, the bottom is that clutter is not an urban myth. The exact number may be hard to agree on, but it is an exponentially higher number with every passing decade. It’s a clutter of ad exposure that runs head on into the ever-constant cognitive capacities of humans. This makes it a crisis of marketing productivity. And that’s the important take-away that I spoke about at the AAAA Management Conference in 2004 (not the ANA). Alas, they haven’t invited me back.
Thanks.
J. Walker Smith
Yankelovich, Inc.
[...] couple of months ago, I tried to track down the source of the often-cited number of ads — 5,000 — an average American consumer sees each day. [...]
[...] In fact, I discovered a pretty compelling post describing a search for the same number — The Elusive Advertising Clutter. [...]
I agree the figures have always seemed inflated, and hard to justify in a formal presentation. More useful would be a breakdown: how many “messages” through magazines, papers, tv, radio, outdoor, etc. Then into the more obscure types: car logos, clothing branding, signage, etc. Shouldn’t be too hard to compute this. Anyone?
[...] idea of advertising.
5,000 was back in the 70’s & 80’s…
today it’s 16,000 ads every day
http://www.classzone.com/books/lnetwork_gr11/page_build.cfm?content=analyz_media_pt2&ch=27
[...] This isn’t about advertising clutter (which apparently dates back to 1759)
[...] the first humans to suffer this horrible uglification arms race. But in fact, as pointed out here, it’s always been thus. “Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very [...]
Does it matter what the sources are of average daily ad exposures? Does it matter what the average number number is?
Advertising has so pervasively invaded American culture, it’s impossible to take a piss without hearing or seeing advertising. It’s impossible to escape. They’re everywhere – a foreign substance that has invaded our precious bodily fluids, on a mass scale.
[...] It’s been estimated that the average consumer will be exposed to approximately 5,000 advertisements per day. Why will your brand and/or message stand out? [...]
[...] than 5,000 advertising messages a day! It seemed almost impossible to get through a day without, advertising clutter. It is a mere three years later in 2010 and the inescapable digital era, forces upon us, an endless [...]
[...] the first humans to suffer this horrible uglification arms race. But in fact, as pointed out here, it’s always been thus. “Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very [...]