Are you buying that advertising?

I was reading an interesting blog entry on what youth are willing to pay for.

One of the lines that I found odd was this:

“They seldom intentionally click on any kind of advertising, and they never buy anything because of the advertising.”

Is this really insightful? How many of us would say that we purchased anything BECAUSE of advertising? Advertising is simply not the reason why buy things. There is no doubt that it influences us, but rarely in a way that we would say we would buy because of it.

None of us sits in the cereal isle and looks at our choices and thinks, I’m going to buy Cheerios BECAUSE of the commercial. One might buy it because it’s helps with cholestrol. Sure they heard that on the advertising, but ask them if they bought it because of the ad, and the answer is likely no.

Ironically, we often do buy things though because of the advertising because advertising creates familiarity and emotional attachment at levels that don’t hit our concious thought. Even when the message does consciously register, we see through the advertising to the message or story that we have bought into. This reminds me of the video recently done by Google  asking a bunch of people if they knew what browser they used. Just like that question, people don’t see the browser, they see beyond it. As I once read, ads don’t carry the weight of a hammer, they carry the force of a light fog.

I’m not a fan of interruption advertising and I do think that it’s effect is being continually reduced as our attention is diverted elsewhere, but I was somewhat surprised that this line was quoted as an interesting fact, by someone that is clearly looking to better understand the market place dynamics.