A 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. Among these sources was a speech by the head of Yankelovich, Dr. J. Walker Smith. Dr. Smith has just left a very detailed comment to the original post. His comment is reprinted below.

“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.”