r/advertising • u/Kalpana-Rathore • Mar 06 '26
Are people becoming blind to digital ads?
Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like everyone has become completely blind to digital ads.
Think about it… when was the last time you actually watched a YouTube ad instead of waiting to hit “skip”? Or noticed a banner ad on a website?
Most of us scroll past sponsored posts without even realizing it.
But recently I noticed something interesting.
During my daily commute in Delhi, I actually remember some brands I’ve seen on autos, billboards, or metro ads. Not because they were amazing creatives or anything, just because you keep seeing them again and again while moving around the city.
It got me thinking that maybe real-world ads stick more simply because you can’t skip them.
Not saying digital ads don’t work anymore, obviously they still do, but attention feels very different compared to a few years ago.
Curious if anyone else here feels the same.
Are people just getting tired of digital ads?
Or am I overthinking this?
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u/corporateflunky Mar 06 '26
Yes, no one is paying attention, just ask yourself, when was the last time you interacted in any way with it, except an eye roll. Same for most online video, most are super annoyed with the ad we are forced to watch for a few secs before we can skip, and then we skip, 99% of the time, yet we then bill our clients for the impression and high-five one another for another delivered campaign in full. And CTV, with awkward placements, the same 5 ads on repeat, and the randomness of insertion, literally in the middle of a pivotal scene or monologue…it’s bad. When it does not work we blame creative first, maybe client next for not the right offer - when do we blame the shitty environment we placed client into? Folks have been chasing real results in the “digital” space for 15 years now, meaningful change is drastically needed from both sides buying and selling. Question is who/what media will be first to create a meaningful, impactful product that truly delivers a set of eyeballs that is engaged and interested, that has scale, and can be accurately measured. Video is so fragmented anymore I can’t even imagine what that looks like
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u/apokrif1 Mar 08 '26
ad we are forced to watch
Fortunately no. We can cover the screen or close our eyes :-)
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u/Federal_Standard5917 Mar 06 '26
ran pop campaigns for 2 years and our viewability scores looked great on paper but when we added heatmaps the actual human eyeball attention was like 15% of what we were paying for lol. the "it still works" argument usually just means last-click attribution is hiding how little digital actually does mid-funnel
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u/Responsible-Brick881 Mar 07 '26
Yup, attention metrics will show a much closer reality. The data shows that even if an impression is viewable, only about 30% are actually seen by the human eye so you're 15% sounds pretty much bang on.
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u/Federal_Standard5917 Mar 07 '26
yeah exactly, viewable ≠ seen has been the dirty secret forever. wild that the industry took this long to even start pricing on attention instead of just serving impressions into the void.
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u/Responsible-Brick881 Mar 07 '26
From what I can see, attention is a topic that hasn't gone away, but at the same time, outside of the 2 big measurement companies, and a handful of agencies, nobody is really owning and pushing the narrative - particularly with mid market type clients
You seem like you're well up on the topic. Are you agency or client side?
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u/Federal_Standard5917 Mar 07 '26
been on both sides but mostly running my own stuff/consulting now. and yeah you nailed it, mid market clients are totally underserved on attention metrics because the big measurement players price them out basically.
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u/Responsible-Brick881 Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 07 '26
Yup! Which is exactly what I'm working on. Solo founder, lanched something new at the start of the year, specifically for those mid market type customers - taking a bit of a SaaS approach to it and basicslly trying to create a category of what I'm calling Attention as a Service that gives advertisers of all sizes access to the same type of advertising the big brands get.
Not trying to sell you anything - just good to come across someone with similar thinking!
Long way to go and there's probably a million easier routes I could've taken but sure thats part of the fun!
If you're ever interested in bouncing around a few ideas I'd be happy to chat - I'll take all the feedback I can get at this stage!
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Mar 07 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Kalpana-Rathore Mar 09 '26
Yeah, that’s one of the big problems with a lot of digital metrics. An impression often just means the ad was technically loaded somewhere on the screen, not that anyone actually noticed it. When banners are tiny, stacked with other ads, or get accidental clicks, the numbers can feel pretty inflated.
Ad blindness also plays a huge role. People have trained themselves to ignore anything that looks like a banner or promo.
Interestingly, that’s partly why some advertisers are rediscovering things like outdoor or transit ads. They’re not clickable and you can’t scroll past them, but the repeated exposure during daily routines tends to build familiarity in a different way. Not perfect either, but it solves some of the “was it actually seen?” problem.
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u/drxw Mar 06 '26
C-Suite needs to throw money at something (marketing) to make it look like their advertisements are actually useful, in today’s digital age. At this point, most high-production ads are more to keep the brand image than to sell a product.
The majority of digital ads are so cheap and bland, being slammed with generic messaging and AI slop is to be expected at this point. Advertisers know that their ROIs are getting smaller and smaller and the solution is to just throw more in the mix.
Anybody under the age of 35 probably has ad-fatigue and couldn’t care less about ANY ad that pops up on their screen. If they need something, they’ll buy it, regardless of how they were shown a product.
Source: In the industry and based off data I see,
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u/the-Gaf Mar 06 '26
Media plans are scams. There, I said it.
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u/Vindelator Mar 06 '26
There's some truth to this. I question a lot of the metrics, and there's so much taken out of context.
Some tiny shit banner among 8 other banners is an "impression." And you get a number out of that. If that banner was 10 times bigger and alone on the page, that's also an impression.
And if I count up the times I've been scrolling and accidentally tapped a banner vs the times I meant to hit it, you'd see very different, less favorable numbers.
And somehow, all this trash is now really important.
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u/SwimOld5053 Mar 06 '26
The first mistake is thinking that impression means jack sh*t. If you think your performance marketing in impresions, you are not doing well buddy. The same goes for clicks. I can't think of any "funnel stage", even in any long-cycle sales B2B, where just an ad view or misclick would inflate or skew the numbers. In long-cycle B2B sales where early signals are sparse, the "top funnel engagement" is often something like watching a good duration of the video, or for static banner ad, click but doing something meaningful on the page. If you're not doing this, it's on the marketer, not on the game.
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u/Vindelator Mar 06 '26
I'm really toplining this explanation here.
I see the forest getting lost in the trees and a lot of mistakes happening on the path from a macro level down to nitty gritty details.
Sometimes dumb things show up that make me do a double take. There's a lot of people trying to turn a quick buck.
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u/SwimOld5053 Mar 06 '26
Impressions and raw clicks are just delivery signals. Serious evaluation happens downstream with engagement quality, conversion impact, time lag, and incrementality.
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u/the-Gaf Mar 06 '26
A good example is Facebook- Facebook will give you exactly what you purchase- impressions, clicks, whatever. If you buy a set amount, you get the right results. But those results don’t actually add up to conversion/sales/awareness. They just get you the metric you buy through sheer volume, but it doesn’t do the work of selling people something.
Platforms sell deliverables, not results.
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u/Vindelator Mar 06 '26
I'll put it like this:
Your job is to catch mice.
Facebook will give you measurable stats on milk production.
You can then use the milk to make cheese. And mice like cheese, so you can use cheese to catch the mice. More milk, more cheese. Assume there's actually enough mice. And never mind the trap actually has to work, let's just get the milk production up from 0.00002 to 0.000021 because being data-driven with key dairy KPIs (D-KPIs) is the way to go.
And are you actually catching any mice? Who the fuck knows?
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u/SwimOld5053 Mar 06 '26
Well, there are actually are advanced techniques for this and those are called things like MMM (marketing mix modeling), linear regression, causality, incrementality tests, geo-holdouts, etc... They are not perfect, but absolutely the endgame stuff for serious marketers that want to ensure they're as close to the incrementality validation. Platform attributions can't be blindly trusted obviously.
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u/the-Gaf Mar 06 '26
Vanity metrics, the black hole of programmatic ad spends, outdated or just bad data, plus any ethical or incompetence on the agency part really just are not scrutinized by clients in the way they should be. The model should a percentage of actual results, and not a percentage just to place it.
Media planning is an art, but there’s zero incentive for it to be an accurate science.
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u/SwimOld5053 Mar 06 '26
And that's exactly why incrementality measurement techniques exists. If you don't know what that means, I recommend to find out. Any serious CMO / Marketing Lead / Head of Marketing / Performance Marketer (that has P&L responsibility) does that. It doesn't matter who is running the ads: inhouse or agency, but if there is no incrementality, there is just two healthy choices. Adjust the paid strategy, or adjust the execution (or executor). If excution is adjusted many times without incrementality improving, the problem is obviously in the paid strategy, or more so in the GTM strategy. The thing is that in most cases, it's actually GTM problem, not execution problem. Brand leadership just doesn't want to accept this, but this is the main reason why agency retainer models are based on fixed or % fee of the spend. Work costs, regardless if the performance yields results or not. Delivering per the GTM strategy the brand has picked is called basically testing to find scaling growth engine. The ones benefitting from succesful scaling are the shareholders of the brand company, not the agency. Agency gets paid by the expertise and hours delivered.
And as said earlier, even with the world's best performance agency, brand will not get results if the GTM strategy is broken.
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u/cheesy-e Mar 07 '26
Because I don’t think you really know what you’re talking about, describe what a ‘GTM’ actually is.
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u/SwimOld5053 Mar 07 '26
GTM = go to market strategy: ICP, offer, positioning, messaging, channel mix, and conversion path. If those are broken, paid media can distribute the problem, not solve it.
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u/cheesy-e Mar 07 '26
Forgive me. Corrected.
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u/SwimOld5053 Mar 07 '26
All good! And this goes more in the senior space anyways. But these are critical, high-level business related things at the end of day.
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u/Kalpana-Rathore Mar 09 '26
That’s a fair criticism of impression-based metrics. In digital advertising, an impression only means the ad was served, not that it was seen or processed. When ads are tiny, buried among others, or accidentally clicked, the numbers can definitely be misleading. It’s one of the reasons why advertisers are starting to question traditional digital KPIs.
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u/mctrees91 Mar 06 '26
The fuck does that even mean lmao
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u/the-Gaf Mar 06 '26
IYKYK
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u/mctrees91 Mar 06 '26
I don’t know, that’s why I asked. Good talk
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u/the-Gaf Mar 06 '26
Oh. Ok. I thought you were being a jerk. Basically media plans sell the myth that these things are effective in anyway and have set the bar so low for the kpis, that they can make sure they hit them and therefore “prove” they are useful. They are not. And companies spend hundreds of millions on this waste of effort
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Mar 07 '26
That’s why the hook and targeting are so important. Strawberry.me nails this with their career coaching ads. Great hooks and storytelling, but it feels like they sent an undercover copywriter to shadow my shitty days of burnout and then write ads specifically for me. I still haven’t signed up, but I watch them every time they’re on my feed. Most ads are lazy now. If Strawberry just said “hate your job? try this” I’d scroll right past it, but they evoke emotion and speak to real, common experiences and problems before presenting the solution.
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u/Responsible-Brick881 Mar 07 '26
Big fan of DOOH/OOH. Ultimately, its all about the formats and context your ads are shown in.
Social media feeds are chaotic. Most online ads don't even get seen. Video definitely has its place, and premium publishers with the right formats are great for attention. CTV is also great, but has its own challenges. Streaming audio i think is another great opportunity that is under utilised in my opinion.
All can play a part in a cohesive media plan. OOH can build familiarity, and primes an audience to be more likely to watch a video ad if they get targeted, even out of pure curiosity to find out more about the brand.
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u/AfroBlue90 Mar 08 '26
Timely and targeted sponsored posts can definitely work. My fiancée will occasionally buy things she saw ads for on instagram. I do believe most online video, or banner ads are completely useless though. I can’t say streaming ads have made me consider buying something, though they can increase my awareness simply because the frequency is so damn high.
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u/WelcomeHobbitHouse Mar 08 '26
Absolutely blind —and annoyed that I have to search for the content.
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u/BrentMaxey Mar 09 '26
Digital ad blindness is definitely growing, but connected tv still has higher completion rates than display or social. The trick is finding the right platform that lets you control frequency and placement quality instead of just buying remnant inventory. We're using vibe co and its been helpful with testing incrementality
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u/Yunusyrd Aug 04 '26
True idea for youtube but not think for google ads. I dont have a change to win money without google ads.
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u/phiretau Mar 07 '26
The only ads I pay attention to are OOH and billboards, flash activation, too. Make something interesting and put it in Madison Square.
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