Today Americans and most people in other 1st world countries are pounded with advertisements. I’m not talking about just the everyday commercials one sees while watching TV, but a tsunami of advertisements placed ever so casually in front of your eyes. These ads range from print, brand labels on clothing and stickers, ads on your social media pages and your phone. Over the years the number of ads we witness each day has increased my almost triple, check out this chart made by “Media Dynamics” (https://sjinsights.net/2014/09/29/new-research-sheds-light-on-daily-ad-exposures/). 
“Digital Marketing experts estimate that most Americans are exposed to around 4,000 to 10,000 advertisements each day.” (Marshall, 2015,http://www.redcrowmarketing.com/2015/09/10/many-ads-see-one-day/ )
Along with most people, I really thought that think number was just a little much. So I decided to dedicate one entire day to test it myself. When I woke up this morning I grabbed my iPhone, shut off my alarm and proceeded to check my social media pages (yes I realized that it is terrible that this is the first thing I did in the morning.) As I laid in bed scrolling through my Instagram I encountered a total of 127 ads in front of me. These were some ads aimed at me through the “cookies system” while others were very indirect, such as “Love your Melon” hats or “Pelican” kayaks. These were simply people just wearing or using these items and posting pictures in them. What an awesome and free form of advertising for companies. I then switched through Twitter and Facebook both presenting, even more, advertisments to my day. I watched commercials, clicked on links of appealing brands, saw more pictures of people free advertising and listened to videos about different companies and what they had to offer. Overall, just while laying in bed this morning, scrolling through social media (for the first time today) I witnessed a total of 408 advertisements. Assuming that I will definitely check all of my social media outlets at least 15 more times in the next 24 hours I will (on average based on my findings first thing this morning) have experienced 6,120 advertisements just on social media, in one day. There are “2.80 billion global social media users” in 2017, if my situation is the average, the total advertisement exposure for all social media users is basically uncountable, and this is just for one day. (Hainlia, 2017, https://www.dreamgrow.com/21-social-media-marketing-statistics/)
As my day continued I got dressed in my “American Eagle” jeans “University Tees” shirt and “Sperry” boots, while eyeing 22 other brands in my closet. I turned on my “Keurig” made some “Nescafe” coffee and put it into my “Yeti” to-go cup (all exposing me to brand labels). I walked outside to my “Subaru” put my “LL-Bean” bookbag on the passenger seat and chomped into my “Poptart” (all also exposing me to brand labels). At this point, I have already been burnt out on counting ads, because I had reached another 307, but I continued on. I saw billboards, ate brands of food, filled my car up at Sheetz (in which overwhelmed me with a number of brand labels slapped on every chip bag, water, and magazine in the store.) By this time I had officially seen/heard 17 ads for Toyota. “Media Dynamics President Edward Papazian says it’s “very common to see the same ad repeated on the same channel every half hour or more, often on a given day, and certain shows are vastly oversaturated with redundant ads.” He suggests spreading out the buys, so the ads can appear on a less frequent basis per viewer reached.” (Sullivan, 2017, https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/292938/) *cough cough @Toyota*. This encouraged me to never buy a Toyota and was my first acknowledged experience of “advertisement burnout”.
I continued my day at Wesleyan being exposed to 1,468 ads by 4:00 pm. I went to my internship at the Tourism Bureau for the next 4 hours getting exposed to another 975 advertisements by 8:00 and am currently being exposed to even more ads on my laptop as I research for this particular blog post. 
Concluding with today’s trial I was exposed to an approximate total of 9,029 advertisements. These were the ones I acknowledged, so I’m sure the 10,000 statistic is insanely accurate. I did experience ad burn out, some brands specifically taunted me all day, others popped up much less. My results were not expected, I truly belived that the 10,000 number had to be absolutly way too much. My favorite ad of the day was one I experienced while scrolling through Instagram…
Riley Queen Blog 