Marketing Myth: We are exposed to 10.000 ads per day

People are more and more exposed to advertising messages throughout the day – at least that is our subjective impression. Furthermore this is also what agencies used to tell as to argument their service in giving orientation in an overly more fragmented and overloaded media space. Also there is written a lot about the topic and magically the number 10.000 keeps showing up over and over again. When google in the need of getting an answer there is a load of articles coming in with different number – all of them are in the thousands. And the knowledge panel gives us the following answer:

So where does this magical number came from? From which study or empirical dataset? Why is there such a huge delta of over 100%?

The first time a number appeared publicly referencing the amount of ad exposures of an average person per day was in the mid 2000s and based on a book by J Walker Smith. 5000 ad exposures was then widely spread by mass media and indicated the rising problem of communication overload.

Earlier in 1968 social scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool and pioneering Harvard mathematician Frederick Mothsteller, Bauer and Greyser conducted a research that made 750 people count manually their ad exposures. The result was an average of 76 exposures per day. Already in that time a number in the thousands namely 1500 and also 5000 war circulated by media.

In 2007 Master student Mark Blackwel recreated Bauer and Greyser’s methodology, concluding with an updated figure of 98.5 ads per day on average. Another newer examination is from Ed Papazian who came in 2014 to his own estimate: 362 exposures per day. Since that, which is now already 10 years back, no further investigation of the issue has been published.

The unspectacular truth

So as you can see there is some evidence that the “real” number is somewhere in the hundreds but not in the thousands. It cannot be really traced back where all the numbers, especially the 10.000, was coming from. But it is circling ever since in the marketing community making an argument for ad overload among the average person.

In some sources you can read that the thousand were published to emphasize the importance and dimension of the underlying problem but never really reinforced with valid data. So to sum up: the myth of 10.000 ad exposures of an average person per day is BUSTED.