Guardian has an article on an experiment performed to see how well consumers can recall advertisements they see. They used special glasses called Eye Contact to capture on film everything the consumer viewed and then analysed the results. I’ll let the article speak for itself, but here are a few snippets:

In one 45-minute journey, the average London commuter is exposed to more than 130 adverts, featuring more than 80 different products. Only half of that information makes any impact, while unprompted we can remember none of the blur of adverts. In an entire day, we’re likely to see 3,500 marketing messages.
[...]
In 90 minutes, Owen saw 250 adverts from more than 100 brands in 70 different formats. The number recalled without prompting was 1.

This is yet more proof that more interpersonal methods of marketing have to be created. One of the reasons these don’t work either (and also boosting Google) is that they are very highly untargeted. It’s like the US bombing campaigns in the beginning of the war in Iraq (pun intended), bombs are dropped in the area, but whom they’re gonna hit; no idea. I wrote about this, yet again, in my thesis that Google is making probably the best mass medium available a highly targeted, personalised advertisement platform – everyone sees something they’re interested in.

But then again there are more personal ways to approach this, like word-of-mouth. That’s another entry worth of writing anyhow, so I’ll stop here. I’ll have something to say on word-of-mouth and the recently launched hopottajat.fi (comparable to the BzzAgent in the US) that are strongly commercialising word-of-mouth. In my opinion it’s great to see these landing in Finland, but they are a bit questionable in my opinion and I’d say there are better ways to handle this. More on this later… meaning, once I’ve finished my thesis (Friday).

ps. There’s some discussion on commercial word-of-mouth here and an article here.