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Writer's pictureSteven Grace

Week 5 - Too Many Ads?

Updated: Dec 2, 2022

Advertising is the process of a firm communicating to consumers to engage interaction with a product. The process of advertising is always adapting, whilst advertising via television, radio, billboard etc is still around, many firms more recently have begun to take advantage of the technologically advanced world we live in, advertising via social media with pop up adverts and interactive adverts, even expanding on traditional methods such as 3D billboards which make advertising more immersive and memorable to consumers.

You could even argue our consumption of adverts is homogeneous, what we consume may be depending on our needs/interests but the way we consume adverts nowadays is practically the same. Even busy tourist, communal locations such as Times Square and Tokyo's Shibuya Crossing are identical looking with their placements and amounts of bright, enchanted adverts.


Online advertising via social media platforms has become an exploitative place for consuming adverts. Most YouTube videos will begin with a pre-roll advert that may range from five seconds (un-skippable) to even minutes (skippable), maybe even a 1hour skippable advert of Peppa Pig episodes if you're unlucky like me. YouTube videos also contain mid-roll ads which revolve in the same way, only this time they are placed somewhere throughout the video's duration. YouTube have a policy when it comes to managing mid-roll ads. For a while, creators could place ads on their videos as long as the video was +10 minutes long in length. However, this policy has recently changed in the past year and now allows ad placements throughout videos which are +8 minutes long in length. This means our consumption of adverts on YouTube has risen due to the effort and quality put into videos since for many, it's their job.


Content creators on social media platforms such as YouTube or Instagram with large fanbases are likely to sign contracts with firms to sponsor a product, taking up space in a video to focus on the brand. Whilst I'm aware YouTuber's do this to make money and profit of a video, the audience is being exposed to further adverts which are more annoying since we have to select the bar to skip the video, find the end of the sponsored section and pray we don't stumble onto a mid-role ad, it's annoying and repetitive even mentioning it.














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