For the past few weeks I’ve been thinking about how many ads each of us encounters in a given day. I’ve tried to keep a person ad log to capture my own exposure, but it’s proven tough. I get distracted and forget to record.

So I did some searching for a good solid number that I can refer to when talking about AdHack. I thought that such a number would be readily available interwebs. Yeah, not so much.

In fact, I discovered a pretty compelling post describing a search for the same number — The Elusive Advertising Clutter.

In it, Ilya Vedrashko does some excellent digging into the popular wisdom and discovers the common answer, ‘3,000 – 5,000 per day,’ keeps getting mentioned because everyone needs a number yet no one really knows the right number.

Many Death of Advertising articles mention the theoretical number of ads we encounter each day as a rhetorical glissade to bolster their point. The number seems right, so it gets repeated.

I won’t pretend to be shocked about the laziness of the reporting, because I’m not. The number, whatever it happens to be, is high and unquestioned because it reflects what people feel: ads suck, yet they’re everywhere, growing in presence and intrusion. They are a nuisance cost on my attention.

And that is the problem AdHack addresses. By hacking advertising, making it imitate how we communicate as humans, we’ll make it valuable.