• by Paul Parton , Op-Ed Contributor, October 23, 2025

Here are some jaw-dropping statistics.

• Eighty percent of our waking hours are spent consuming some form of media or entertainment.

• In that time, we see 208 advertisements every hour -- around 4,000 per day.

• Two million TV commercials are televised every year.

• A staggering 5.3 trillion display ads that are served annually. Thats 5.3 trillion with a T.

Those stats beg a big question: Why do we need so many?

Which leads to an even more troubling answer: Maybe we don’t.

The question and answer came to me recently after shopping for a pair of cycling shoes. At the risk of providing too much information, cycling shoes must be snug on your feet, and you can end up wearing them for many hours at a time, so fit and comfort are important. As a result, I’ve bought the same brand of shoes, Scott, for at least six years. And as with all sports apparel, there is a predictable obsolescence built in. Shoes will last a season or so before they must be replaced.

Strangely though, given that my purchase habits are so predictable, I’ve never been encouraged by the brand to consider replacing my shoes, even though that would have been a useful reminder for me and a profitable communication for them. On the other hand, after buying my latest pair, I was immediately served with a barrage of advertising on various streaming services encouraging me to buy a Scott bicycle.

To be honest, at the time, I was impressed with the ad tech translation from online search and mobile shopping to commercials delivered to my streaming services. But that first impression quickly waned, and I wondered why I was being served those commercials at all. There is an obvious chicken and egg issue with the brand’s communication strategy. One tends to buy a bicycle first and then buy bicycle shoes. It would be an unusual shopper who bought the bike to match the shoes. So, I had to conclude that while the tech was impressive, the purpose was poor. 

It reminded me of a conversation I had with my daughter and her friend as they were preparing to celebrate their first legal-drinking-age New Year’s Eve – my advice then was "Just because you can, doesn’t mean that you should." I think it can be applied with equal veracity to sellers and users of sophisticated ad tech platforms. Just because you can serve streaming commercials to someone who has recently bought from you doesn’t mean that you should.

A few years ago, Kamran Asghar, the founder and CEO of Crossmedia, was regaling me with a tale of a media audit they had completed for a prospective client which determined that the client, through their existing agency, had unwittingly been making programmatic buys with frequencies over 40x (significantly higher than the 3+ effective frequency rule of old). I checked in with him recently to see whether it still held, and his response was that although frequency caps were much improved, inefficiencies were still rife.

Indeed, those inefficiencies were reported recently by MediaPost with data highlighting that the waste in programmatic advertising spend has increased by 34% in just the last two years. Resulting in $26.8 billion in wasted marketing spend. (At this point, it is worth recognizing that $26.8 billion is roughly equivalent to the GDP of Zambia.)

So why are we wasting so much money? Is it because performance media is so effective that a little (or a lot) of waste is worth it for the marketing effect that follows. Once again, the answer appears to be no. Andrew Tindall who generates masses of conversational thought leadership for the research company System 1 wrote recently that, “We’ve never spent more on advertising, and it has never done less for us.”

Going on to support that declaration with evidence from the IPA, WARC, the Effies, and his own company that suggests we are creating a marketing death spiral by focusing our efforts so firmly on the short term that we forget about the long-term implications of our brand and business-building activity. (He also points out that, counter-intuitively, digital display and generic pay-per-click advertising have two of the lowest ROI indices of any medium.)

And so, yet again, why? Why are we wasting so much money on doing things that are clearly inefficient and appear not to be very effective. I have two possible answers. The first is that 83% of marketing leaders consider demonstrating ROI to be their top priority – but only 36% of those marketers say they can accurately measure it. (So, in the absence of being able to measure the whole thing they cling to the ability to measure something.) For the second, I’ll swing back around to Crossmedia's Asghar, who made the simple suggestion that, “We are a lazy industry, and we trust the ad tech when we shouldn’t.” I think there is probably some truth to both.

But importantly, we need to shift from ‘why are we doing it?’ to ‘what should we do instead?’. And in doing so, maybe we should stop asking 'can we?' and start asking 'should we?' Quantity of advertising is no substitute for quality, and automation will never be a replacement for strategy. But if we continue prioritizing what's measurable over what's meaningful, those jaw-dropping statistics of advertising bombardment will only grow more jaw-dropping. The brands that figure this out first, those that put some precision into their performance marketing and recognize that while they can do X, maybe they should do Y, will be the ones that win. My next cycling shoe purchase may still a season away but the brand that remembers that, rather than bombarding me with bicycle ads today, will get my business tomorrow.