Advertising

Role of Advertising

Advertising is an integral part of every advanced country's economy and culture, but as statistics suggest, advertising plays an unusually important role in the United States. Robert Coen, a leading authority on advertising expenditures, estimates that worldwide expenditures for advertising in 2007 were approximately $630 billion. That same year, expenditures for advertising in the United States were about $280 billion. Table 1 shows the relationship between advertising expenditures in the United States and other countries in 2007. It shows that the 6.3 billion people outside of the United States who are exposed to $350 billion worth of advertising, with $280 billion of advertising aimed at the 300 million people who populate the United States: people in the United States are exposed to about twenty times as much advertising as people in other countries.

A considerable percentage of U.S. residents' exposure to advertising takes the form of television [Page 11]commercials. A typical thirty-minute television show in the United States has seven minutes of commercials. Statistics indicate that Americans spend the equivalent of nine years of their life watching television and see two million commercials by the time they reach sixty-five years old. The average child in America sees 20,000 television commercials in a typical year. What these figures reveal is that television viewers in the United States watch an enormous number of television commercials. To these figures on television advertising we must add other forms of advertising, such as radio commercials, advertisements in print media such as newspapers and magazines, billboards, advertisements on the Internet, on mobile phones, logos on T-shirts, labels on grocery products, signs on storefronts, and advertisements of one kind or another on just about any flat surface that is available.

Citizens of other countries don't, as a rule, watch as much television as people in the United States and aren't exposed to as many commercials. In many countries, there are also limits on the amount of time that can be devoted to commercials.

In 2008, American media usage, as reported by the United States Census Bureau, reveals the following figures (projected):

These statistics on media use, most of which carry advertising, explain why U.S. residents have an incredible amount of product knowledge—information about the price and features of various products—even though some of them may not know very much about history, literature, the arts, and similar topics. That is because they spend a great deal of their leisure time watching television and being exposed to advertising, which, whatever else it may be, is a form of persuasion.

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