Q: When are people most likely to pay attention to online ads?

A: When they’re relevant and include freebies.

This is the result of IAB UK’s study conducted recently (PDF of the summary). The problem here is that only an alarmingly low percentage of users in any given age group claims not to notice ads. My theory has always been that people hate admitting to being influenced, but here 70% of people don’t have a problem with it at all. Which begs the question — are they really telling the truth, or is this completely theoretical?

If this was based on actual behavior data, I bet the first winning category would be “when ads are big enough to be noticed”, closely followed by the second — “when they’re relevant”.

(link via  @jonathanmendez)