• by J. Walker Smith , Op-Ed Contributor, January 24, 2024

I know a thing or two about numbers going viral. Quick story.

In the early 2000s, marketing clutter was big news. In 2003, the Federal Do-Not-Call Registry was opened, the HIPPA Privacy Rule was introduced and the CAN-SPAM Act was passed. 

During this time, I was president of Yankelovich and we developed a product that used proxy variables to link names and addresses in third-party lists with attitudinal segments built from U.S. MONITOR, our long-running syndicated values survey. The objective was more precise matching of marketing and attitudes, thus less clutter. It worked well, and we still offer this product at Kantar.

Our initial marketing push was to researchers, in order to legitimize our methodology. Our subsequent push was to marketers, for which we shifted from statistics to benefits. We told a story about clutter degrading marketing efficiency. A big part of getting the word out was a 2005 book I co-authored entitled, Coming to Concurrence. 

In our opening chapter, we painted a picture of clutter. For example, we mentioned Atlanta advertising luminary Joel Babbitt, who once lamented the unused billboard space on the sides of dogs, adding that bigger dogs like Newfoundlands could charge a higher rate than Chihuahuas. When Babbit ran marketing for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, he proposed promoting the games on a gigantic metallic billboard placed in geosynchronous orbit that would be visible to three-quarters of the world.

We also mentioned the various numbers of daily ad exposures that marketers have tossed around over the years. Not to endorse any particular number. Rather, to illustrate the concerns of marketers themselves about what they do. As worries among marketers have grown, so have their guesstimates—from 500 to 2,000 to 5,000 ads per day, including everything everywhere, from brand logos on coffee cups to taxi signage to retail displays to movie and TV product placements.

More exacting calculations of ads that actually break through the clutter always run below 100. But for the profusion of things trying to break through, there is no reliable way of counting, so it comes down to the gut feel of marketers. Which seems to be more of a sinking feeling than ever, hence, a bigger number than ever.

Given the interest in clutter at the time, it’s no surprise that our rundown of ads per day caught the attention of reporters, including The New York Times and “CBS Sunday Morning.” Our illustration of concerns quickly morphed into an exact count. The next thing you know, my name and 5,000 ads per day were joined at the hip.

I have tried to tamp down the viral misinterpretation of 5,000 ads per day. To no avail. I continue to field at least one call a year about it. This year it was Tim Harford’s BBC show, “More or Less.”

Attention-grabbing numbers take on a life of their own. Perhaps best known in marketing circles is the internet meme about the speed at which technologies take off. You’ve seen it—radio a lot of years, TV fewer but still a lot, and the internet very few. Similar memes compare other media, always to assert that technologies scale faster nowadays.

This meme pricked the curiosity of Gisle Hannemyr, founder of the first commercial ISP in Norway. He dug in and also in 2003, published his findings. It turns out that this meme originated with a chart in a 1997 Morgan Stanley report co-authored by Mary Meeker. The sources used were obscure and no longer available, so to assess the accuracy of this meme, Hannemyr used Census data. He found that despite our gut feelings otherwise, the internet scaled total users no faster than radio or TV. (Indeed, if you look at percentage of population rather than total numbers, radio and TV scaled faster.)

I’m not suggesting that clutter isn’t a problem or that the pace of change is slower these days. I am just noting that viral numbers tell us more about how we feel about things than how things actually are.

Viral numbers aren’t about reality. They’re about how we feel about reality. That’s why they’re viral. Which means that viral numbers aren’t wrong. They’re just measuring something else, and what they get right are the most important things at that.