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By Root 952 0

of my literary career was when I asked her if she could, “you know, do both.” Represent me in between tiny-tricycle riding and clown-makeup-application classes. As long as she remembered to take off the red nose and giant floppy shoes for face-to-face meetings, it was cool with me. This was also, in some ways, a high point. Because if you’re still compelled to write after your agent has abandoned you for a remote chance at a career in the circus, it’s not because you think you’re going to be a best-selling author. It’s because you like it.

Part 2

At Large in Adland

Thoughts on Impressions

I saw a subliminal advertising executive, but only for a second.

—Steven Wright

I Was Bombarded by 20,000 Messages (Or Maybe It Was Just 102) While Writing This

The goal of the exercise was to chronicle and occasionally comment upon every ad-like object that I was exposed to in a randomly selected twenty-four hour period.

If I were fifteen years old, marketing people would be extremely interested in something like this. They would fly planners and trend watchers in from all over the country to witness it, to film it, to seek deeper meaning in every click of the mouse, turn of the page, zap of the zapper. They would record my radio presets and count the blinks of my dilated eyes during every second spent watching kids trying to be just like me on the WB network.

Of course, they would pay lavishly for the white paper that would emerge, or to link in to a streaming video of the fifteen-year-old’s frenetic, media-saturated day.

Because the marketing person who best understands the relationship between a horny, pimply-faced, disaffected, enigmatic manchild and the culture he consumes more ravenously than any other demographic is the wealthiest person in adland.

But, alas, I am not fifteen years old.

Depending on the source, which ranges from Consumer Reports and Adweek, to the Center for Interactive Advertising, to the (privately funded) Institute for Concerned People Who Make Up Facts to Scare Us With, to the (corporately funded) Institute That Takes Scary Facts and Finds Ways to Make Us Comfortable with Them, the average American is bombarded by anywhere from 250 to 20,000 advertising impressions every day.

The two ballpark figures that emerge most frequently in links generated by a Google search for “advertising + bombarded” (a nine-impression event in and of itself) were around 250 or 3,500 daily impressions, with not much in between. So this is still quite a disparity. Being exposed to 3,500 advertising impressions a day translates to roughly 2.5 impressions per minute, or one every twenty-four seconds. Being exposed to 250 impressions a day would mean about one every six minutes. When I worked in advertising, I used to see ads in my sleep. Some already existed. Some I was making up for the next day’s meeting. But I imagine that most people do not see or create ads in their sleep. So clearly, the impressions-per-minute ratio would rise by more than a third for those human beings who participate in the act of sleeping and whose lives are not consumed by making ads. And since I was a liberal arts major whose last math book included crude drawings of sticks and stones (“If five sticks equals one stone, how many sticks would equal seven stones?” I didn’t know … I was stoned), I won’t bother to calculate the impressions-per-minute math for someone supposedly exposed to 20,000 commercial messages in a twenty-four-hour period, but I think we can all agree that it would be an absolute shitload, a disturbing total capable of A Clockwork Orange–like ramifications, and that using the phrase “bombarded by” in this context would be justified and accurate, and quite possibly an understatement.

So what is the most accurate measurement of the average American’s daily exposure to advertising? Are we being bombarded or massaged or simply pestered by advertising messages? To answer any of these questions, one would first have to determine what exactly constitutes an “average American.” What counts as an ad? What’s the difference