Web adverts are very different

The thing about any non-linear medium is it's fairly easy to get around advertising; even the most intrusive web adverts can be mostly declawed fairly easily if required. The problem is with the linear media, there isn't any practical way to miss TV, film or radio commercials other than switching it off altogether.

There is no distinction in the qualitative nature of adverts that is reliant on the size of the company - all adverts have essentially the same purpose and arguing anything else is special pleading. Commercial advertising is intrusive by design, whether it's for Coke or Joe Bloggs' Laundry Express, I don't need to be informed that I have a need with a company being ready to fill it.

But people have conflicting needs; the same people who whinge about the intrusiveness of adverts are the same ones who complain about the cost of the BBC licence fee. You can either pay up front or suffer adverts but you can't have neither. Subscription based services are inherently unfair as they generally only lead to the better off getting access to them and they're commercially risky; if people have to pay for something they'll either take their business to somewhere cheaper or find out they didn't need it in the first place. Only captive markets or de facto monopolies make subscriptions work (see Sky telly, for instance).

If you think billboard and newspaper/magazine adverts only work in concert with TV you are missing the point that they're often designed to target specific demographics you can't reach with TV. TV isn't as pervasive as people think it is because it's very expensive and with so many channels very hard to target. I think anyone being complacent about the impact of advertising or thinking they're less susceptible to it because they don't watch TV is massively under-estimating how deeply entrenched it is.

@heh

"Who, in the under-four-feet demographic, doesn't already know about McDonald's, et al?"

McDonalds must be wasting their money on all that advertising then!

For small companies/services, advertising tells the world of your existence. The same is not truee for high profile brands. For McD and Coke, advertising is little short of brainwashing and relies on multiple inputs.

These companies advertise for one reason only: it works.

We don't watch TV in our household and don't listen to radio ads. We see billboards and newspaper ads, but these are of little impact as they are designed as "refreshers" and only really work if you see the TV ads. If you cut out TV ads (and interactive web ads), perhaps 90% of the whole ad impact is removed.