Consumers Love To Hate Ads

• 63 percent of U.S. adults report seeing more ads, and three-quarters of Americans agree that internet ads are intrusive.
• 67 percent of U.S. consumers aren’t willing to pay more for a service without ads.

From the moment many Americans wake up in the morning and stare into the blue light of their mobile device screens or flip through the channels on their televisions, they see ads everywhere — on the sidebar of their favorite social media site, playing before and in the middle of an exercise video, and during their shows.

Advertisements are virtually ubiquitous, and with the proliferation of screen time, it’s no wonder that 63 percent of adults in the United States report seeing more of them than they used to, compared to the 24 percent who said they were seeing the same amount. That’s according to a Morning Consult poll of 4,402 U.S. adults conducted Aug. 24-Sept. 8.

According to The Morning Consult: U.S. adults aren’t happy about all that exposure. Three-quarters of those surveyed agree that internet ads, outside of social media, are intrusive, and 69 percent say the same for social media ads. Television ads are close behind, with 65 percent finding them intrusive, according to the poll, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 1 percentage point.

Marketers spent $421.5 billion on advertising in the United States last year, according to data from forecaster Zenith, a unit of Publicis Groupe. That figure constitutes more than 2 percent of the $18 trillion U.S. economy.

This year, ad spending is expected to grow to $434.5 billion. Some of the biggest drivers of that growth have been Google parent Alphabet Inc. and Facebook Inc., which together command more than 60 percent of the U.S. digital advertising market, according to research firm eMarketer.