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But. They're. Almost. Never. Entertaining. No effort is ...

“But. They're. Almost. Never. Entertaining. No effort is put into 99 percent of commercials to be entertaining or persuasive or clever. The consumer is not a consideration. It's just lazy, mindless, noise.”
Claim is false
Confidence: High Checked on August 24, 2026

Summary

The majority of commercials are created with persuasive intent and consumer considerations, as evidenced by research linking creative quality to sales lift and extensive use of data-driven creative analysis. While a notable portion of ads are low‑quality or forgettable, the assertion that 99 % are lazy, mindless noise is not supported by current evidence.

Sources 60 searched

sciencedirect.com
  • Television Commercials - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics

    Still, most surveys showed that viewers accepted these interruptions as the price for otherwise free entertainment and information. That television had developed a widespread persuasive impact—as a generation of television salespeople had argued to potential advertisers—was the basis for Congress banning broadcast cigarette advertising in 1970—the first regulatory ban on a legal product's advertising.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
webcontent.indianhills.edu
  • ENG 105: Composition I Learning Unit 5: Audio Page 1 of 5

    money, and effort in packaging their brief solicitations into very effective and persuasive messages. We say that advertisements are persuasive because they attempt to move us to action--advertisements · aren’t there simply for our entertainment or our viewing pleasure.

gitnux.org
tvtropes.org
  • Ridiculously Loud Commercial - TV Tropes

    In less slimy cases, however, the advertisers might genuinely think that louder equals better. The futility of this should be obvious, as if there's one way you can guarantee people will avoid your product like the plague out of spite, it's blasting your ads so loud that some poor viewer will be getting noise complaints from six streets away.

research.mountain.com
forbes.com
thedrum.com
  • The problem with much AI-powered advertising is its meaninglessness | The Drum

    And that’s the issue, because our feeds are already saturated. The result isn’t a creative revolution. It’s a flood of basic, forgettable output where 85% of digital ads can’t hold attention for even 2.5 seconds.

  • How many ads do we really see in a day? Spoiler: it’s not 10,000 | The Drum

    20th-century researchers, McDonald’s says, were motivated not by coming up with a number, but by using that number to shed light on concerns from the zany (that people will become physically ill from information overload) to the existential (that ramped-up advertising creates its own clutter that will lead inexorably to reduced impact and increased resistance). The former has since been debunked – “people manage quite fine, they just pay less attention”; researchers have developed more nuanced ways to attend to the latter.

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