Lesson 12 — Activity 1: Advertising Is Everywhere

From the PBS Kids website, here are some interesting statistics on advertising:

• By the age of 20, the average person in North America has seen one million commercials.

• The average person in North America spends one year of his or her life watching TV commercials.

• 40% of the mail we receive is advertising.

• 2/3 of the space in newspapers is taken up by ads.

Although we may try to tune out advertisements and commercials that we are not interested in, we are surrounded by advertising almost everywhere we go.

 
With so much competition for consumers, advertisers try very hard to get our attention.
The advertising industry takes the task of getting our attention very seriously. Behind the ads that we read, see, and hear are billions of dollars spent on research about what works and does not work in advertising.

To be successful, an ad must attract our attention and make us think that we need or want to buy the product being advertised. As well, a successful ad makes the name of the product stick with us so we recognize it the next time we go shopping.

Unless we examine advertising techniques, we may not even be aware that this is part of the process that influences us as we grab a product to add to our shopping cart!

We pay for the ads we see when we buy products from a company that does a lot of advertising. That is, the cost of advertising is added to the cost of the product, so we need to think about what we are buying and why we are buying certain products. After all, the advertisers are thinking about it!