Ad Space

May 22, 2003

The newest issue of Wired is a great one. It is guest edited by Rem Koolhaas, a man at the forefront of the architecture world, and the issue focuses on different spaces in our world. One of the sections looked at the ad space.

The author, Steve Hayden, discusses how the world has become completely saturated with ads. It's obvious that we see them everywhere and that they all seem somewhat ineffective, but he gives us some numbers to back it up. Every time the number of ads in a television commercial break double, the viewer's ability to remember any given message drops 45 percent. He also mentions that countries with less clutter have more effective ads.

Hayden claims that the answer to our woes is for advertisers to do better ads. Yes, this will increase the effectiveness of the given ad, but how will it help us to wade through the neverending stream of advertisements? Of course I enjoy an ad that is visually stunning or conceptually brilliant, but I am more concerned with the ads that just get in my way. If we accept that these are useless, then how can they be avoided?

I guess I keep asking questions because I don't know the answer. I would love to see media in the U.S. cut down on their number of ads and instead put out a smaller number of quality ads. Unfortunately, this seems unrealistic. In the meantime, I will keep complaining about it until someone insightful happens upon my post and does something about it.

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