Is There Such A Thing As Too Much Advertising?

We cannot go a single day without see advertisements. Whether that’s at home, on our phones or on TV, or in public, on billboards or on buses. This raises the question of “is there such a thing as too much advertising?”

We often think of adverts as getting in our way: stopping us from watching a YouTube video and anxiously waiting to press the “Skip Ad” button, and the annoying breaks between TV shows that seem to last forever and show about 10 adverts. Everywhere we look there is some sort of advertisement. We cannot escape it.

This can be seen as a sign of advertising taking over public spaces, which, of course is bad for us. Twenty percent of US consumers said that they would stop using a product entirely if they got too many advertising messages. This is something that seems to happen a lot. I find that if you go onto a certain website to look at a product, a few minutes later, when you’re scrolling through Facebook, your timeline will be filled with adverts for the product that you’ve just been looking at. In a way, this can be seen as a way of invading our space as there really is no escape of adverts. Consumers are becoming increasingly agitated by the use of adverts on social media, specifically when they are of products you have recently viewed.

In some cases, websites are hard to use due to the fact that adverts take up the majority of the page and get in the way. Similarly, adverts invade our public spaces, such as streets, which could easily be used for art, rather than a huge company trying to persuade a person to buy a product that they don’t even need.

In relation to this, the increasing use of adverts seem to have an effect on people, including myself. I tend to spend a lot of my time on YouTube, meaning that I’ve been a lot of adverts that I have no choice but to watch. Over time, I seem to notice the same adverts shown to me over and over again. The majority of the time, the products seem to be ones that I have expressed interest in in the past. These adverts then become familiar to me and I am able to spot the products in the shops, and I have to say, it’s hard not to buy them as it somehow makes the product seem trusted and makes it seem as though I have bought the product before, when I have only seen hundreds of adverts of it online.

In conclusion, I do believe that there is such thing as too many adverts, due to the fact that they are everywhere that we look. From being strategically placed in the background of a football game, to being on the player’s kit, to the adverts being shown in breaks between TV shows.