When advertising becomes background noise

Watch people in an airport departure lounge when a television screen begins showing advertisements. Most will not look up. Some will continue talking, others will check their phones and a few will glance at the screen before returning to whatever they were doing. The screen may be bright, the production may be expensive and the message may have been carefully crafted by a team of advertising professionals, yet for most people it is simply part of the background. Now consider the same thing in a newspaper, on the radio or along a busy road. Advertisements are everywhere, but attention is increasingly somewhere else.

This is one of the more curious problems facing advertising today. Consumers have never encountered so much commercial communication, yet they have rarely been so successful at ignoring it. The irony is difficult to miss. The advertising industry has become better at targeting audiences, buying media and measuring exposure, while audiences themselves have become better at avoiding, filtering and forgetting advertising. The question is no longer whether consumers are seeing advertisements. They undoubtedly are. The more important question is whether they are actually paying attention.

For much of the twentieth century, advertising enjoyed a relatively comfortable relationship with its audience. There were only a limited number of television channels, a handful of major newspapers and magazines and a finite number of radio stations. If an advertiser bought a prominent position, there was a reasonable chance that a large proportion of the intended audience would encounter the message. The audience had little choice but to remain within the media environment in which the advertisement appeared. A commercial break meant waiting for the programme to return. A newspaper advertisement occupied the page in front of the reader. A billboard stood along the road and could not simply be switched off.

That world has changed dramatically. The modern consumer lives in an environment of almost continuous choice. A person watching television can pick up a mobile phone during an advertisement. Someone reading an online article can move to another page with a tap. A listener can skip a commercial and a viewer can move past an unwanted message in seconds. Even in physical environments, advertising competes with screens, conversations, traffic, music and an extraordinary amount of visual information. Attention, once largely controlled by the media owner, has increasingly come under the control of the consumer.

The scale of this resistance is becoming clearer. A Gartner survey published in April 2026 found that 81 per cent of US consumers said they try to ignore or tune out advertisements. More than half, 52 per cent, said they had taken active steps to avoid advertising, including paying for ad free content or using ad blocking tools. These figures relate to the US market and cannot simply be transferred to every country, but they capture a broader behavioural change that advertisers everywhere should take seriously. People are becoming conscious of the value of their attention and increasingly unwilling to give it away automatically.

India provides another revealing example. Online video consumption has expanded enormously, giving advertisers an unprecedented opportunity to reach audiences at scale. Yet the opportunity comes with a serious qualification. A study reported by ET BrandEquity in 2025 found that 78 per cent of viewers skip advertisements whenever possible. Three in five viewers considered the advertisements served to them irrelevant, while 69 per cent disliked seeing the same advertisement repeatedly. The message is fairly straightforward: being able to reach somebody does not mean being able to engage them.

This distinction between exposure and attention is at the heart of the problem. Advertising has traditionally measured success through indicators such as reach, frequency and impressions because these were relatively easy to quantify. But an impression is not necessarily an act of attention. A person can pass a billboard without reading it, turn the page without noticing the advertisement or sit through a television commercial while thinking about something else. The advertisement has technically reached the consumer, but psychologically it may never have arrived.

The problem becomes particularly acute when advertisers confuse repetition with persuasion. Frequency has always been important in advertising because repeated exposure can strengthen memory. But repetition has a limit. When the same commercial appears again and again, consumers can move from recognition to irritation. The advertisement becomes predictable and therefore easy to dismiss. What was intended to build familiarity can eventually become a cue to look away.

More fundamentally, consumers have become increasingly sceptical of the language of advertising itself. They have heard that products are revolutionary, extraordinary, unbeatable, innovative and transformative for so long that such words have lost much of their power. When every product claims to be exceptional, exceptional becomes ordinary. Consumers have learnt to recognise the familiar architecture of persuasion and, in many cases, to switch off before the argument has even begun.

This is where the growth of consumer generated information has changed the balance of power. An advertisement is no longer the primary source of information about a product. Before making a purchase, consumers can read reviews, compare prices, watch demonstrations, examine comments and ask other people about their experiences. A hotel can describe itself as luxurious, but prospective guests can see what previous visitors thought. A product can claim superior performance, but consumers can watch independent demonstrations. A service can promise reliability, but customers can investigate whether other users agree.

Trust has therefore become more complicated. A Nielsen Global Trust in Advertising study involving more than 30,000 respondents across 60 countries found that 83 per cent trusted recommendations from friends and family, while 66 per cent trusted consumer opinions posted online. Television advertising was trusted by 63 per cent, newspaper advertising by 60 per cent and magazine advertising by 58 per cent. Traditional advertising clearly retained significant credibility, but the comparison revealed something important: consumers often place greater confidence in people they perceive as having no commercial reason to persuade them.

That helps explain the appeal of authenticity. An ordinary person describing a genuine experience can sometimes be more convincing than an impeccably produced commercial. The ordinary person is not necessarily trying to sell anything. The advertiser obviously is. That difference does not make advertising dishonest, but it does make the consumer more alert to its intentions.

Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that traditional advertising has become irrelevant. Newspapers can still influence public opinion. Television can still create powerful emotional connections. Radio can still build familiarity and intimacy. Outdoor advertising can still dominate a physical environment. What has changed is the amount of effort required to make these formats work. Simply occupying space is no longer enough.

The strongest traditional advertisements have always understood this. They offer something in return for attention. Sometimes it is humour. Sometimes it is emotion. Sometimes it is information. Sometimes it is a striking observation about everyday life that makes the audience recognise itself in the message. The medium may be old, but the idea feels fresh.

This suggests that the advertising industry's problem is not fundamentally a problem of media. It is a problem of relevance. A consumer does not care whether an advertisement has appeared in a newspaper, on television, on a mobile screen or on a billboard if the message has nothing to say to them. Conversely, a relevant message can work in almost any medium. The question is not where the advertisement appears but whether the audience has a reason to stay with it.

That requires advertisers to reconsider an assumption that has been central to the industry for decades: that consumers are waiting to hear from brands. They are not. Consumers are busy. They are looking for information, entertainment, convenience, reassurance and solutions to problems. Advertising enters their lives successfully when it contributes something to that experience. It fails when it merely demands attention.

The future, therefore, will not necessarily belong to digital advertising at the expense of traditional advertising. Nor will traditional media disappear simply because consumers have more digital choices. The more important divide will be between advertising that interrupts and advertising that earns attention. A newspaper advertisement can be ignored just as easily as a digital advertisement, while a powerful idea can work beautifully in either environment.

For advertisers, this means that the old question of “How many people did we reach?” is no longer sufficient. A more uncomfortable question needs to follow: “How many people actually wanted to pay attention?” The difference between those two questions represents much of the challenge facing the industry.

Consumers are not turning away from advertising because they have stopped buying things or because they have lost interest in brands. They are turning away because attention has become a choice. They can skip, mute, scroll, block, switch and move on. The advertiser can still reach them, but reaching them is no longer the same as engaging them.

For decades, advertising competed for space. Today it competes for something considerably more valuable: a few seconds of genuine human attention. And in a crowded world where almost everybody is trying to say something, the advertisement that succeeds may not be the one with the biggest budget or the widest reach. It may simply be the one that gives people a compelling reason to listen.