As someone involved in marketing, I thought you might find this interesting. I keep hearing statistics on the number of ads we are exposed to in a day, so I googled “the average American has been exposed to.”

The results support the joke that 97% of all statistics are made up on the spot. Here is what I found.

The average American is exposed to …

• about 3000 advertising messages a day
• at least three thousand ads every day
• 100 advertisements before 9 am each day.
• 247 advertisements in one day
• 5000 advertising and promotional messages per day
• over 30000 commercials each year
• hundreds, or even thousands, of ads each day more than 3000 advertising messages each day
• 3000 ads per day on television, radio, bus benches, billboards, etc
• 247 commercial messages each day
• at least three thousand advertisements every day
• more than 2000 ads a day
• over 3000 advertisements a day
• 4,000 marketing messages per day
• at least 3000 ads every day
• some 3000 advertising sermons to this grubby god every day of his or her life
• as many as 4000 ad messages daily
• some 3000 ads every day
• over 1500 ads every day
• a full hour of advertising every day
• hundreds, or even thousands, of ads each day
• over 3000 marketing messages a day
• 3500 ads a day
• an average of 3000 advertising messages every single day
• more than 1600 advertisements each day

I didn’t want to spend a lot of time on this but I was curious where the 3,000 number originated. From what I learned they simply source each other. While 3,000 seems to be the most common made-up statistic, I’m going to use 1,724. It seems like a more believable number. You can go ahead and source me on that.