How much advertising is too much?

Advertising has been a marketing communicator from as early as the 1440s. Since then advertising has reached major milestones in terms of promoting, communicating, and reaching larger platforms. But advertising has also found new persuasive ways into the public's eyes. To the point where advertisements cover an entire news story on the internet, or not being able to get through a broadcast without someone trying to promote something. So then comes the question, when is advertising too much? When does advertising overpower the real content, the news?

It's no surprise that advertising has changed drastically in the last few centuries. With the growth of media, and now having the technology and the internet involved in our everyday life has forced advertising to find different approaches to catch the attention of the audience. These new tactics include pop up adds interrupting the browsing experience, auto-playing videos to distract the audience from the web page, and misleading advertisements that promote the viewer to click on a link that is different than what they had originally thought. EZ Marketing recently reported statistics on the effects of advertising. They reported that 32 percent of marketers say that traditional paid advertising is the most overrated advertising tactic. This number may seem big but over 75 percent of the revenue made from U.S. newspaper print advertising has dropped since 2000, so with this decline, the number of other advertising tactics can only go up.

With the growth of technology over the last decade, it's normal to expect advertisers to follow where the public is going. In fact, The Fortune reported in 2017 that 85 percent of U.S. adults now receive their news on a mobile device, which is up from 72 percent in 2016. But with the increase of audience reading the news on their devices, comes the overcrowding of advertisements. So what is the main takeaway? The article or the advertisement? Are the advertisements taking the attention away from the journalists who conducted an article to be published on the web hoping to have an engaged audience?

Even with an online audience, they are going to try to avoid the crowdedness of advertisements. Evidence clearly shows this, which proves that the audience has more power in what they do and don't choose to buy into. Huff Post interviewed Michael Ajah on "Are their too many advertisements online?" and he quoted "Publishers are takings ads to a whole new dimension. Basically, ads are meant to provide revenue to the publisher and return for the advertiser. But these publishers are not after providing an amazing user experience. Their only target is the revenue." From this comes the question, What's more, important to the writer, publisher, or audience, the revenue or the content?

Have we really steered that far away from the main purpose of journalism? Not the promotion of an advertisement, not the revenue that goes to the publisher. The purpose is to inform, to communicate, to be able to connect with an audience in a new creative and personal way. We've allowed media and technology to fall short of the main purpose with the surplus of advertisements. We need to focus more on the content being produced, the information being shared, and the relationships formed. But this idea only exists in a perfect world. Consider this world now to forever be on the road of
perfection.

Photo Source: dotcult.com