I am just amazed people pay attention to the ads. I’m sure this is happening to me but my brain has gotten so good at filtering them out that I have no idea what they’re even trying to sell me!
Thing is, your brain does all the processing: it reads the label, it detects the colors and brands, it associates it with previous experiences and reinforces all these connections. Then, at the last moment it decides not to engage the neocortex, so you’re not consciously aware of it.
Seriously, go visit Stackoverflow Jobs. Start scrolling. It takes me so much conscious effort to read those listings with the yellow background. I'm specifically trying to read every listing and I keep missing them. They just look like rubbish ads, so my brain has been trained to ignore them.
It's the same experience with custom adverts on eBay or real estate websites. Any non-standard listing, I keep missing and have to scroll back through several times to "find" them.
My interest is in the manipulation taking place on all the people who do click on ads, and the likely negative affect on society.
Obviously, enough people click on ads to make it worthwhile for the advertisers. And this is despite all the people who think ads don’t work on them.
I was referring to the ads described in OP’s article- ones that show up around “real” content.
Of those ads, I’ve clicked none.
This was debunked.
There is, however, something sort of in the same ballpark that has been reproduced and does show that your brain does have an astounding capacity to at least partially remember images seen only briefly.
Take a large collection of images of a variety of ordinary things. Pictures of things like a bunch of bananas, a dog catching a Frisbee, a cat sunning itself near a window, kids waiting for a school bus, a cat pouncing on a mouse, someone eating a banana, yadda yadda.
Divide the collection randomly into two equal sets, A and B.
Show test subjects the images from set A serially, letting them see each image for a hundred milliseconds or two, with occasionally rest breaks if the image set is large (I believe this has been with image sets up to 10K in the total collection, so it can take quite a while to go through set A).
If you then tested people on how well they could recall these images, they would suck at it. Ask them to describe all the dog images they saw, for instance, and they will only recall a small fraction of them.
Where it gets interesting is if instead the test you do is at a later time you randomly pair up each image from set A with an image from set B, and serially show the subjects these pairs in random order and with the random left/right placement, and ask the subjects to identify which of the two images is one they have seen before.
People get it right some astoundingly high percentage of the time, like 90% after several days. They might not really "remember" most of the A set in the sense that they can purposefully recall them, but apparently we do automatically and effortlessly store something that is good enough to let us tell which of two images is the one we've seen before.
I wonder if this effect would apply with ads? You see a banner ad in passing for brand X molten boron, not paying attention to it. This doesn't make you subconsciously want to go buy the product--that was the old debunked subliminal advertising theory.
But later, you actually need some molten boron and so head out to the store. They have brands X and Y. I wonder if because of the banner ad you saw a few days ago, you'd recognize brand X as one you have seen before and be more likely to choose it over brand Y.
The title really says it all: subjects shown up to 10,000 pictures (once, for a five seconds apiece) remembered a substantial fraction of them two days later. This is somewhat specific to images (and even moreso for “vivid” ones); people did worse with dictionary words.
However, one important detail is that subjects were told to pay careful attention to the stimuli; they were repeatedly reminded that a memory test was coming up.
PDF: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/psych/rust-lab/publications/standi... Journal Page: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1464074730840034...
It wasn't until some time later when I saw my next Liberty Mutual ad that I realized that they had never even crossed my mind during this whole process. Ha! I still chuckle. Now I am even more conscious to avoid things that I see a ton of ads for. I hate ads!
I'm sure I've also read somewhere that those most affected by ads are those who believe they are not affected by them.
Last time was probably when I went to cinema, which is well over a year ago.