Not at all true. There’s a whole industry around measuring this (e.g. https://www.edo.com). A massive amount of money is spent on advertising for large companies. McD spend ballpark $3bn across the parent and franchisees, they want to make sure they get value.
You can ignore something actively but you are a still picking up on the message of it’s ubiquitousness. I think we have all had the experience of considering buying a {redacted} or something sometime after seeing and ignoring an add for one.
On the contrary: it's because people ignore them so much that motivates those very same brands to constantly push harder, and more obnoxiously, each time major sporting events are on.
Like, what-on-earth was Visa thinking when their sponsorship of the Olympics had all the food-vendors and merch sellers boasting how they were "Proud" to decline payments from customers unless they're using Visa-networked cards[1] - which demonstrates they just can't exercise restraint.
The problem is that you have no idea if those ads are working, not really.
Do I go to McDonalds because I saw an ad, or because it 3 minutes away and the kid wants nuggets? Do I shop at my local supermarket because they buy every third ad on YouTube, or because it's the closest? There are a ton of details that influence our daily choices, and I'm not suggesting that ads aren't one of them, but I'm starting to doubt that it's the defining one. When I look at what I buy it's: availability, cost, and specification. There's not a hold lot advertising can do about any of those three.
If we could truly measure which ads works and which doesn't the entire ad based economy would crash over night.
Ads don't have to be the primary deciding factor but it does make the rest of the process in the sales pipeline easy.
Whether we realize or not subconsciously our minds will associate the product and ad. When that association is reinforced by the salesman, a strategic placement on the shelf, or discount offers it is easier to convert it to sale.
This is an entire industry. It's profitable. It works. The ad based economy exists because they do truly measure which ads work and know exactly how much money it makes them.
"They" being the companies that sell advertisements and the marketing departments whose budgets are contingent on the fiction that advertisements create value, yes.
Early in my career I worked for a pharmaceutical giant as a statistician. One of the things we would work on was trying to determine how much the various advertising efforts the company did actually moved the needle. Every year was the same miserable experience. The company would spend millions and millions of dollars in various advertising channels. We would attempt to determine how effective it was, but the wayin which they advertised and the way we collected data made it very difficult to generate any kind of insight at all. We would make recommendations as to how to adjust execution moving forward to ensure we could reliably determine how much value we were getting out of these campaigns, all of which would be ignored. They would massage our findings to tell whatever story they needed and would do the same thing the next year.
The marketing division is its own organization, with their own incentives that don’t necessarily align with the broader company’s incentives. They also were heavily addicted to relying on external analytical consultants who could pump out all the slide decks and pie charts they wanted, which would inevitably show that the marketing was not only effective, but should be invested in more the following year.
But the problem with marketing and advertising is that it's impossible to know if a campaign will be a hit - a flop - or the butt of jokes from an entire generation (e.g. New Coke, Jaguar 2025; or it may very well just work despite all the industry naysayers like Apple's translucent plastic look from 1998 - I/we felt no-one would ever buy an overpriced and non-expandable PC that looked like a kid's toy, or a loo-seat laptop.
...of course, what actually happens is the strongest personalities in the C-suite eschew what their MBA course taught them about trusting the experts below them in the org chart; instead they champion their own personal pet ideas, no matter how much predictable damage they'll do to the company's share-price, because they couldn't possibly be wrong; he is the CTO, after-all; very smart!
Yes, it could be a mass-delusion drive ad-spend, but I think you're vastly underestimating how much these logos actually go in to "brand recognition".
Next time you walk into your local electronics retailer and look at TVs, you might see a Samsung, LG, HiSense.
Chances are, if not for massive amounts spent on advertising sports, you'd overlook some of these brands in favour of the ones you recognise.
It won't be a conscious, "I saw this during the north London derby so I'll buy it", but subconscious name recognition will have a huge impact on willingness to buy.
I specifically avoid products i see ads for, cause the product can't be that great if it needs obnoxious advertisements, so the effect is more than subconscious.
Now, i don't see many ads cause i block all of them where i can and roadside advertisements are not allowed here in Germany, but even if i was, i am of the opinion that the effect of this subliminal manipulation is severely overstated by the people selling ad space.
I think the idea that i would buy something just because a company writes their name everywhere is ridiculous and as far as i know studies show that the effect on buying decisions is basically not measurable. I think the entire value in advertisements is just more people in general knowing of a brand.
fwiw, while I can mention firestone, bf goodrich, more michelin, what I actually did on my last tires is drive to the tire shop and go whatever les schwab sells in-house. Promotion and distribution need not be confined to the internet. I saw the tire shop while driving, so I guess you could point out they have a business sign.
That's missing the point, or supporting it.
That is brand recognition/knowledge and not a factor in decision making. Knowing three tire brands doesn't tell you if i would buy any of them because of their ads. Personally i never bought tires, mine just are whatever "Mercedes Original" branded ones the car comes with. If i had the need to buy new ones i would get some recommendations. I would not go "I'll buy X because i saw the name a few times".
It's hard to think of any buying decisions i make where ads could matter. When i buy a phone i decide based on features with the highest priority being that it runs GrapheneOS. When i go shopping for clothes i don't look at the brands at all, and i avoid any pieces with visible branding on it. I can't think of a point in my live where i picked some product because i saw it or the brand in an ad. The subconscious part is so hard to measure and disprove but it is just as hard to prove it works as advertised.
Ads might make you remember a name, but i am questioning how much that affects my buying decisions, especially when it makes me trust the brand less when they have to fill every ad slot for people to even talk about them.
The gambling ads have a conscious effect for me: I think “what a terrible world this portrays, I’m glad I don’t gamble”. For me, being reminded of gambling is just a reminder of the fact that I don’t like gambling. The same is true of some other ads too, they mostly serve to remind me that I define my personality in opposition to these things.
However, I have to presume that the effect is different for at least some other people.
The NHL does it. Watch a televised hockey game, and the ads that the venue has sold on the dasher boards are electronically replaced by ads that the broadcaster has sold. Sometimes when there's a different camera angle you briefly see the ads that are really there.
