Do we see 10,000 adverts per day?
More or Less: Behind the Stats
BBC
4.6 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 13 January 2024
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How many adverts does the average person see in a day? If you search for this question online, the surprising answer is that we might see thousands – up to 10,000.
However, the idea that we see thousands of adverts is a strange and confusing one, without any good research behind it. We investigate the long history of these odd numbers, with the help of Sam Anderson from The Drum and J Walker Smith from Kantar.
Presenter: Tim Harford Series producer: Tom Colls Production co-ordinator: Brenda Brown Sound Mix: James Beard Editor: Richard Vadon
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and thanks for downloading the more or less podcast. |
| 0:03.4 | We are a weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Harford. |
| 0:09.4 | This week the number in question has been sent in by loyal listener Brian Clegg. |
| 0:14.4 | He emailed more or less to report that he was... |
| 0:17.0 | Amazed to read in Andrew Sims and Leo Murray's book, |
| 0:20.0 | Badertising, the claim that in 2003 we encounter between 6,000 to 10,000 ads every single day. |
| 0:27.0 | That is indeed quite an amazing claim. |
| 0:32.0 | There are only 24 hours in a day and we're asleep for some of them. |
| 0:35.3 | How could there possibly be enough time to see 10,000 ads? |
| 0:39.7 | You can just do a big mat calculation and 10,000 ads a day would work out as one ad every six seconds, |
| 0:47.7 | which is not possible. |
| 0:49.0 | This is Sam Anderson, an editor with The Drum, a marketing publication, and I have to agree, surely to see |
| 0:55.3 | 10,000 ads a day you'd need to be doing nothing except, well, looking at adverts. |
| 1:01.1 | But as we know, one more or less, the fact that a number doesn't make much sense |
| 1:04.3 | doesn't stop it from being repeated and these massive claims about the number of |
| 1:08.6 | ads we see are everywhere on the internet. They also regularly appear in your inbox if you're an editor for |
| 1:15.2 | marketing publication, The Drum. Some people say 1500, some people say 3000, some people say 5000, |
| 1:21.2 | some people say 6, some people say 10,000. |
| 1:23.6 | Sam set out on a mission to find the source for these massive numbers, |
| 1:27.8 | and the first thing he had to do was sift through a whole load of rubbish. |
| 1:31.5 | When you search the internet for this stat you find lots of blog |
| 1:34.7 | posts by marketing influencers who are of course exactly the kind of people who are good at |
... |
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