Invisible Advertising

Last year, during one of my classes, a student told me he hadn't seen any ads that day.

He was completely serious, and he wasn't exaggerating to make a point.

Bemused, I asked him if he thought he might have walked by a bus shelter or outdoor billboard on his way to the subway station. Or perhaps looked up while on the subway en route to campus.

He said he might have done so.

I asked him if he spent any time online during his commute, perhaps searching on Google, watching videos on YouTube, or shopping on Amazon. Or if he had instead chosen to read the newspaper, browse a magazine, or listen to a podcast.

His sudden smile and the look in his eyes told me he understood my point:

If he had done any of these things, would it even be possible not to see or hear a single ad?

It's highly improbable. While tracking every single exposure to every single marketing message over the course of 24 hours would be impossible to quantify accurately, it's broadly estimated that the average person is exposed to between 4,000 and 10,000 ads every day. So if you took the low end of that figure (4,000) and divided it equally across 16 waking hours (assuming you got a full eight hours of sleep), that would be 250 ads per hour. My student made his comment halfway through our class, at about 4 pm, so even if he slept in until 10 am that day, he would have (statistically speaking) likely been exposed to 1,500 ads.

Yet he was genuinely convinced he hadn't seen a single one.

And I believed him, not because I believed he really hadn't seen any advertisements, but because I believed he didn't remember a single one.

Put another way: of the hundreds of advertising messages my student had almost certainly been exposed to during the day, not a single one was relevant enough, amusing enough, or memorable enough to capture any of his attention, not even for long enough to recall even having seen it.

Ineffective advertising is the same as invisible advertising.

Do it well, or don't bother doing it at all.

(And don't do it at all at your own peril.)

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