Guess what? Consumers don't like advertising

Stuart Elliott of the New York Times is talking about market research around advertising today. That topic is being much discussed at the 51st convention of the American Research Foundation continuing in Manhattan today. Most interesting in the article is some research on receptivity to advertising that was performed by Yankelovich Partners.

"There are those looking for the new media to be the saviors for advertising," Mr. Smith said, "but we can use the new media to be ever more intrusive and saturating, creating ever more clutter."

That may be a reason for the new survey's finding that "there are still a lot of things consumers don't like about advertising," he added. "There probably hasn't been as much progress in changing that as we think."

For instance, 56 percent of survey respondents said they avoided buying products that overwhelmed them with advertising, up slightly from the 54 percent who said so in the 2004 survey. And 69 percent said they were interested in ways to block, skip or opt out of being exposed to advertising, the same percentage as in the survey last year.

Said another way, the tyranny of too much is quite real, and consumers are looking for ways to fight back.