Ilya Vedrashko recently went to a lot of effort to track down and validate the elusive source of the oft-quoted statistic that people are exposed to c. 5,000 advertising messages a day.
In response she received a helpful reply from J. Walker Smith, the president of Yankelovich, who was aware of one of the earliest attempts to estimate this data in the 60s. It makes for interesting reading:
"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.
He goes on to suggest that all subsequent estimates are likely to have been based on a similar methodology. So my advice would be to take this figure with a pinch of salt kids, it is no more than an informed estimate and I can only imagine that it has become less accurate over time as each subsequent analysis has felt the upward pressure of expectation.
I have it on very good authority that a once oft-quoted statistic covering exposure to advertising messages in the UK originated from an off-the-cuff guess by a research director at a media agency. The journalist who heard of this third-hand printed the stat, unattributed. The story goes that the research director, reading the story, wondered "where that idiot found that number", until the penny dropped.
Posted by: Victor Houghton | February 20, 2008 at 05:49 PM