This just in: people ignore irrelevant ads

So, in UK, Addvantage Media runs a study on ads for YouGov, a summary of which is available here.

Recap of results:

• Only 12% of visitors to “large” websites report that they often look at ads
• 56% of ABC1 adults (ABC1 = upper, middle, lower middle classes) are more likely to go to specialist niche sites dedicated to their interests than visit larger portal sites.
• 57%t of consumers rarely or never pay attention to the advertising on major portal sites.

Although I have my doubts about the validity of results where people say whether they look at ads or not (after all who would admit to being influenced?) the overall mix of results in the study is interesting.

Despite all this research coming out all the time, the big dilemma in front of many online media planners stays the same when planning a campaign: do you choose a site with an established media brand and likely very generalized, higher quality content, or do you go the network route where content and audience are more specialized? And where managing a campaign becomes much more complicated?

The same study says that 22% of users only go to niche, sector-specific destinations, while only 2% visit the mainstream sites. So maybe the problem will fix itself, after all.