I don’t think any of us are immune to advertising, or as at least not as immune as we might like to be. Ads are very carefully targeted and crafted to resonate in the most effective way possible. Some even play on the fact that we think we are immune and above the sales pitches of wily ad people. Of course, we’re not: we’re all prone to it.
Then there are the ads that do not look like ads – for example, sponsored articles on Buzzfeed that do not engage in hard sell. I think also there are brands that we grew up with and just trust, so sometimes we don’t even think about the brands we use; we just use them without questioning why, and there’s good reason for that: a great deal of effort goes into creating and maintaining loyalty.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/hG0ZXD89Bq0?wmode=opaque
We should remember too that it is not just brands that use advertising, but all sorts of organisations, e.g. not-for-profits, government departments, etc. In summary, advertising is just sponsored communication: some of it we easily ignore, others parts may capture attention for a moment, and on other occasions the message will resonate with us. Although there’s plenty of research data and evidence that says that we’re all prone to marketing messages, I wonder if the idea that we might be immune stems from ads that are not actually aimed at us? After all, advertising agencies and marketing strategists don’t target all of us with all of their goods as this would be a waste of money spent on media. Instead they segment their ads by behaviour, demographics, life stages, lifestyles and so on.
"If we really wanted to avoid advertising, we wouldn’t go out very often, we wouldn’t really communicate, and we wouldn’t keep up with our friends online."
So the idea that we’re going to be exposed to and potentially convinced by all ads makes no sense. In terms of actively avoiding advertising, I guess to an extent you could not go out in public to avoid billboards, and we could certainly switch off the television, but when you start to think about the bulk of advertising today in terms of where the money is actually spent, most of it is online. So, although in our own minds, particularly if you’re of a certain generation, you tend to think of advertising in terms of visuals, such as magazine, TV or billboard ads, what we really need to be looking at are those boring sponsored links on Google and display ads on Facebook, where a great deal of ad spend is going.
If we really wanted to avoid advertising, we wouldn’t go out very often, we wouldn’t really communicate, and we wouldn’t keep up with our friends online. So I think the idea that we could avoid advertising is definitely no.