Advertising overload

Description:

The last decades we are faced with tons of advertisements, sometimes we like it, but probably in more cases we don't like it or even hate it. All over the world, advertising is sometimes considered as annoying. Due to the increasing amount of advertising, there are more and more people who are willing to do everything to be able to skip as much ads as possible.

We also see that consumers want to decide on their own which ads they want to see and which not. They dislike the advertisers who are constantly bothering them with irrelevant ads.

Advertising overload is part of a broader problem called information overload. Due to especially the Internet, there's so much information available that it is very hard for people to figure out which information they need.

Enablers:

• Knowledge of companies that advertising still works and that advertising is 'a weapon to fight against the competitors'.
• Rise of (new) media like TV, internet, mobile devices.
• People's increasing prosperity: they have more money to spend, advertisers know that.

Inhibitors:

• Increasing ability of people to scan advertisements and focus only on the interesting ones.
• Government's fight against spam.
• Users ability to skip ads (e.g. popup blocker, spam filter, TiVo)

Paradigms:

The increase of advertisements can result in different things. One the one hand it could be that people will be able to deal with the huge amounts of advertisements. On the other hand we already see that governments are making regulations to forbid spam etc. This will reduce the advertising overload.

Experts:

• 24/7 Real Media

Timing:

Already partly occuring, but it will increase significantly the coming years.

Web Resources:

• http://ciadvertising.org/SA/fall_03/adv382j/emilie/site3/ResistanceAdv.htm
• http://brand.blogs.com/mantra/2004/05/advertising_ove.html
• http://www.247realmedia.com/about/press_2005/2005-11-08.html