The Impressions That I Got
As the Director of Creative Strategy for the true[X] Ad Studio, a big part of my job is to advise clients on how to get the most mileage out of consumer attention. Since we build interactive ads, this often means I’m pitching experiences that encourage, honor, and react to user choice.
To that end, not long ago, I was preparing a presentation on how powerful choice can be — especially as it pertains to advertising. In other words: Choice is good for consumers, good for storytellers, good for brands, and good for, well, everybody.
That is, until I realized that the success of pretty much every other product in the universe relies exclusively on choice. You have complete domain over your choice of everything — from movies and sandwiches, to cold medication and manila envelopes. Advertising is just about the only industry I can think of where, by and large, users don’t have a choice about what they’re seeing or hearing. It is, instead, a product that tries to siphon off that which you happen to be paying attention.
In a sprawling world full of choices, advertising is largely choiceless. And the ad industry probably doesn’t have enough of a grip on just how pervasive this is. If we want to advertise better, we ought to understand just how much we’re intruding into consumers’ lives.
I started wondering exactly how many ads I was not choosing to see, but was exposed to anyway.
So, I decided to count them. For a single commute, from my home in New Jersey to my office in Manhattan, I would count every single ad I ran across.
Now, before I started counting, there had to be some ground rules to make sure my count was clear, measurable, and consistent throughout. The name of a business on its storefront did not count, for example, but anything on a storefront with an implied CTA — like a business’ phone number, or “Breakfast Sandwich Special: $2.99” — did count. I also wasn’t allowed to go out of my way to look for ads; no careening my neck or taking the long way. And simply “seeing” an ad counted. I didn’t need, say, 50% visibility and 2-seconds of exposure (which is the standard benchmark for viewability for digital ads). If I saw it, it made the cut.
Now, knowing all this, I’d like to ask you, dear reader, to make a guess in your mind:
How many ads do you think I saw on my way into work?
Remember, I live in the suburbs of New Jersey, and I work in Manhattan. So if you decide to test this out for yourself, your mileage may vary.
Here we go.
New Jersey Suburbs
My count started slowly. Mostly, I would guess, because I live in a quiet neighborhood without a real “city center.” I saw the occasional billboard, as well as smaller, community-focused initiatives that were printed on regular printer paper. But they counted! As did the portable toilet with a phone number on it. Remember — implied CTAs make the cut.
This Section’s Count: 18
Inside The Train To Secaucus
I want to say most New Jersey Transit train cars have, let’s say, 8 ads apiece? Depending on how crowded the train was, I was expecting to rack up some strong numbers here. Alas. I was able to find a car on the first train, and that train didn’t take full advantage of its ad space. So, we had a relatively low amount of exposures here.
This Section’s Count: 3
Outside The Train To Secaucus
This I counted as ads ON the train itself (I remember one for a gambling site. Yay! Awareness!) and any ads or billboards I saw in passing.
The number was mercifully low. I’ll be honest — at this point of the experiment, I was beginning to think my assumptions were off. After all, I hadn’t seen that many ads yet. And sure, while I didn’t make the choice to view these ads, these were generally easy to ignore.
The ride was lovely. There was water. Grass. Birds. All these rare non-Manhattan-y things. Maybe, just maybe, my assumptions were wrong.
And then I got to Secaucus, New Jersey.
Never, ever doubt the ability of Secaucus, New Jersey to ruin your entire day.
This Section’s Count: 3
Secaucus Junction
HEY DID YOU KNOW KEAN ONLINE IS A UNIVERSITY THAT YOU CAN ENROLL IN IF YOU WANT?
HOW ABOUT NOW? DO YOU KNOW NOW?
WILL FOUR MORE ADS ABOUT IT WORK?
NO? HOW ABOUT ANOTHER FOUR?
KEAN! KEAN! KEAN!
ADS! ADS! ADS!
Every wall on every track had ads for Kean Online. Secaucus, it would seem, was the tip of the advertising spear. For a moment, I wondered if I should have taken the ferry to work instead. But then again — not even the Hudson River is safe from advertising these days.
But the worst part wasn’t Kean Online. It was a placement that I never realized was quite so nefarious:
The rotating, electronic billboard.
You know what I’m talking about. Those screens that show you what is, basically, an electronic version of a print ad every 3–5 seconds? Three happened to be in my line of sight. That’s three fresh exposures every few seconds in the time it took for my train to show up.
And my train was delayed.
This Section’s Count: 41 (!!!)
Top Funnel Movement Achieved: Negligible (there was some holiday ad that was either for the Nutcracker, or nuts and crackers, I’m not sure.)
The Train to Penn Station
After the Secaucus Bombardment™ I was treated to a mercifully non-intrusive train ride. The interior and exterior combined for just nine ads. This would have been three if not for another rotating electronic billboard visible on the highway (have I mentioned I, increasingly, am not a fan?)
That was short-lived, of course, since we then descended into the tunnel towards Penn Station. In the darkness between New Jersey and New York, not a single ad could be seen.
Which led me to believe that the only reliable way to escape unwanted advertising was to hide in a dark tunnel and never, ever leave. It’s a nice daydream, of course. To embrace the night. To become SludgeMar, ruler of the sewer people, reigning free from the grip of advertising while skulking through the deepest, darkest shadows of Manhattan. For it is in the depths of the city’s underbelly, dear friends, that the unholy grasp of the marketing funnel is invisible to every-
Oh no. We’ve arrived at Penn Station.
This Section’s Count: 9
Penn Station
I don’t want to talk about what happened at Penn Station.
This Section’s Count: 87
Penn Station — Take 2
Ok.
Fine.
It was at Penn Station that I was subjected to a two-pronged advertising blitz. The first was a collection of FIVE rotating electronic ads, all visible at the same time, and all refreshing on a very aggressive timeline. I took a picture for you. And in the time it took me to take said photograph there were an additional, I don’t know, 15? 25? exposures that I missed.
But I want to talk about the lion’s share of those ads. Or rather, the gorilla’s share.
On this particular day, I counted somewhere in the neighborhood of 50–60 ads just about the new “King Kong” musical on Broadway. Column wrap-arounds, billboards, posters, and even teeny-tiny ads next to a couple of clocks that clearly haven’t been cleaned in 30 some-odd years. It was oppressive.
This means that there is likely someone, somewhere, who is selling a “Penn Station Takeover” package, where a brand’s message can be housed in 50–60 unique placements. How exactly are they pitching it? Are they treating each of the estimated 650,000 Penn Station visitors (as of 2016) as once-a-day visitors? Or are they doubling that number, thereby accounting for people using Penn Station for commuting into and out of the city at the beginning and end of a work day?
If so, that means they could be estimating up to 1.3 million potential customers each day. Assuming there were 55 placements for this King Kong musical (I didn’t get a specific count, but let’s say) does that mean that there’s someone pitching this package as driving 71.5 million impressions per day?
Not to go all existential on you, but what on earth is the value of this? I am now aware that King Kong is a musical. Great! I am also likely never to see it because my customer experience with this particular product is 1) the feeling of drowning in a frankly insane volume of brand messaging, and 2) an association with an overcrowded train station that visitors frequently describe as a post-apocalyptic hellscape, especially if there’s a Rangers game happening next door. I sort of want to find out if the gorilla sings and dances, but not enough to want to see it.
I understand that they’ve done the math, and that for every disinterested grump like me there’s probably a greater number of people that will consider seeing the show. I’m a write-off. I get that.
But I just…who enjoys this?
This Section’s Count: 87
Walking From Penn Station to the NQRW Train
I want to be clear that this is maybe a five-minute walk.
This is, however, the five-minute walk from Madison Square Garden past the Manhattan Mall to Herald Square. It features a murderer’s row of rotating electronic ads and reminders that, hey, Starbucks — still a thing!
It also was on this walk that I suddenly remembered that literally every taxi and bus houses multiple ads. There are a total of 13,587 taxis and 4,373 buses in New York City. That’s a lot of ads.
Mercifully, I only saw a few.
This Section’s Count: 50
Herald Square Subway Station
Here’s where my count gets a little funky. Or, at least, where some of you will strongly disagree with what I’m counting as an ad.
Um. How many ads is this?
I mean this definitely can’t count as eight different ads….right? They’re all united to tell a single story? Or are they?
Hm. Let’s think of it from a perspective of how this was sold. My guess is that nobody would try to sell each view of these ads as 1/8th of an exposure (though I could be wrong!) so I guess maybe these are each individual ads?
I decided to err on the side of inflation. I counted them all separately. Not to mention the column wrap-arounds and other fractions-of-an-ad that surrounded me.
And that’s how my three minutes in Herald Square yielded 36 new ad sightings.
This Section’s Count: 36
The Subway Ride From Herald Square to Union Square
Question for you New Yorkers out there: how many ads are in a subway car?
You figure: 4 on each wall, making for 8 poster-style ads. But then there are those ones up top. You know, Dr. Zizmor territory. I counted 6 per side.
Which is to say that in one subway stop I got another 20 ads in my brain.
This Section’s Count: 20
Union Square Subway Station
Ok, home stretch! I just needed to leave the train station and head into work!
The bad news, of course, is that ConEd has a new ad campaign that wants you to know about, uh, electricity?
I never stood a chance. My short walk yielded another 32 — 32! — ads.
The good news is these ads definitely achieved Consideration from yours truly. I’m absolutely thinking about the possibility of using electricity at some point in the future.
This Section’s Count: 32
The Walk To Work
Luckily, the front door to my office is pretty close to a subway entrance. So, I wasn’t subjected to too many more ads. But the few I did see in a bank window telling me about low, low rates and a killer APR officially broke me.
This Section’s Count: 4
The Final Tally
Remember at the beginning of this article when I asked you to think of how many ads I saw on my way to work? Think of that number now.
How close were you to 303?
I’ve heard people guess 20. Maybe 30. Nobody goes this high. And these are people in the advertising industry.
Even worse, this was just on my way to work. This didn’t account for any digital ads I saw on my phone or audio ads I heard on podcasts. Or, for that matter, my commute home.
How many ads did I see that day? 1,000? More? How many do I see a week? A month? A year? Over the course of my life?
I want to go back, for a moment, to the thing that started this all: the power of choice.
There’s something mind-blowing about the fact that I chose exactly ONE coffee shop that day, but there were more than 300 choices I didn’t have the opportunity to make, but did experience on my commute.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this experiment, it’s that the internet has become one big Digital Penn Station (or Digital Secaucus, depending on your relative generosity.) That is — useful hubs where you can get coffee and pizza and you will absolutely drown in unwanted advertising.
Here’s what I think: by insisting on advertising without choice, a brand message is likely to be rendered effectively silent and invisible by its (apparent) 300-plus neighbors. Try to cut through the clutter by dominating the landscape messages a consumer didn’t choose to see — as a certain musical gorilla did — and you’re creating a negative experience.
I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of these choices being made on my behalf. If you’re reading this, and you’re in the industry, remember — you’re a consumer, too. And ultimately, your choices could help make better, more sane experiences for everyone, yourself included.
303 times on that commute, I did not get to make a choice.
What choice will you make?
