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Hello and welcome to more or less from the BBC World Service, your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life. And I'm Tim Harford this week, the number in question has been sent in by loyal listener, Brian Clegg.
He emailed more or less to report that he was amazed to read in Andrew Sims and Leo Murray's book advertising.
The claim that in 2023 we encounter between 6000 to 10,000 ads every single day.
That is indeed quite an amazing claim.
There are only 24 hours in a day and we're asleep for some of them.
How could there possibly be enough time to see 10,000 ads?
You can just do a big Mac calculation and 10,000 ads a day would work out as one ad every six seconds, which is not possible.
This is Sam Anderson, an editor with the drum, a marketing publication.
And I have to agree surely to see 10,000 ads a day.
You'd need to be doing nothing except uh well looking at adverts.
But as we know on more or less the fact that a number doesn't make much sense doesn't stop it from being repeated.
And these massive claims about the number of ads we see are everywhere on the internet.
They also regularly appear in your inbox.
If you're an editor for marketing publication, The Drum, some people say 1500 some people say 3000, some would say 5000. Some people who say six, some people who say 10,000 Sam set out on a mission to find the source for these massive numbers.
And the first thing he had to do was sift through a whole load of rubbish.
When you search the internet for this stat, you find lots of blog posts by marketing influencers who are, of course, exactly the kind of people who are good at getting blog posts to feature prominently on search engines.
One of these blogs is the source for the claim in the advertising book.
Although they do also say there is no rock solid data on the subject.
And there's a lot of these sorts of companies that regurgitate the same sort of article cos they know that there's search traffic on it
and they don't do their research and they just say 8000, 6000, 10,000 wading through these posts.
Sam followed the trail back nearly 20 years to a time when two far more legitimate publications, the New York Times and CBS news cited one of these very big numbers this time, 5000 ads per day.
It's not clear how the number got from 5000 to 10,000.
It seems people just added 1000 here and there as time went on.
But we do know the source for the New York Times cited for the claim of 5000 ads per day.
Yes, we did write that number, but it's been taken out of context quite a bit.
My name is Jay Walker Smith and I am Knowledge with Cantor, which is a global research and consulting firm that number 5000 a day featured in a book he wrote in 2005 called Coming To Concurrence.
We were quoting different estimates of the amount of clutter that consumers are trying to sort their way through each day.
And we were just kind of uh citing some of the numbers that have been quoted over the years, some more scientific than others.
One of the numbers we quoted was a high estimate at the time, which was 5000 ads per day and that's the number that got latched on to.
So this 5000 number was not for the number of adverts that a consumer actually sees and registers each day, but rather for the clutter as Walker calls it, these large numbers are not counts of the number of ads that people pay attention to.
They typically are counts of the number of kinds of marketing things that people are surrounded by in a given day. So it could be a logo on a coffee cup or an ad that's playing on the TV, in the bank lobby that you could see through the plate glass window as you're walking down the street.
You are all the ads that cover taxi cabs as they pass you in the street.
All of these kinds of marketing messages, if you will or marketing exposures are competing for your attention and we attend to very few of them. I mean, almost none of them register with us, but they do constitute part of the environment within which consumers find themselves.
What's more the source of that high estimate of 5000 a day that Walker wrote in the book. Well, it certainly wasn't scientific. It was a blog that was written long time ago and it was just a speculative number, another blog without a proper source.
The blogosphere snake of bad statistics has swallowed its own tail.
All of this means that it really isn't accurate to say that we see that many adverts per day. Certainly not by any normal definition of the word. See, there's a case to be made that we glimpse more adverts than we consciously see with a logo on a coffee cup lurking in our peripheral vision or a poster flashing past as we drive down the street with our eyes on the road ahead.
I suppose you might say that you encounter them.
That's what the authors of advertising write.
And that is of course, the book which originally caught the attention of our listener, Brian Clegg.
But even with that generous and some would say meaningless definition, the original estimate of 5000 pieces of visual branding clutter was itself just speculation on an old blog post.
Jay Walker Smith has patiently explained this to journalists every year or so since he wrote the number in his book, but with very little success.
So it does seem to be a number that has some endurance
and I don't seem to be able to uh kill it.
So there's no good reason to say we see 10,000 ads per day or even really to say that we glimpse or encounter 5000, but let's not give up there.
Sam Anderson didn't marketing gurus have been making claims about advertising numbers for a very long time and Sam followed the trail all the way back to the 19 sixties.
The very start of it was this piece of research by a man called Edwin Abel, who was a marketer for General Foods.
Edwin Abel wanted to do a rough calculation on how many adverts people saw.
He looked at how many hours of TV and radio people watched or listened to every day and worked out the average number of ads per hour on those mediums.
So he multiplied those two numbers together to come up with this number.
And this is our 1500 this 1500 ads a day number is still kicking around today.
Often as the lowest of the big numbers in the blogosphere.
And it is potentially a kind of legitimate calculation for the number of ads seen or heard, albeit from a quite different time in history.
But there's some fine print to consider that is a number for a family of four.
So if you divided that between a family of four, you'd actually be looking at something like 375 ads in this estimation.
So it was rough and ready then.
And it's nowhere near 10,000.
But marketers always did like to exaggerate.
And so sure, why not assume the number grows over time?
1500 becomes 3000, becomes 5000, becomes 6000, becomes 10,000.
Maybe we'll be hearing about 20,000 after a day in 10 years.
So there's just one question left. What's the right number? How many ads do we see every day?
But of course, the answer is, it depends, it depends where you are in the world, what kind of life you live and how you define an advert.
So, Sam decided, why not count the adverts he himself saw.
It's just one number and applies only to the editor at a marketing magazine living in London on one arbitrary day.
And what I saw were 93 ads I tried to be as open as I could about the fact that it's likely that I didn't notice every ad I could have done, but equally, I didn't miss that many, I don't think Sam also persuaded other people in the industry to do their own count. The most I've seen is 100 and 54. And I think I was quite generous.
The lowest I've seen is 26.
The most interesting version of the experiment was that I tasked someone to see as many as he could in a day and he got to 512 what a way to spend the day. And you will have noticed it's nowhere close to 10,000 ads.
That's your lot for more or less this week.
Please do get in touch if like Brian, you spot a number you think needs a long hard look.
Our email is more or less at bbc.co.uk and until next time.
Goodbye.