I was recently on a boat ride on the Ganga at Varanasi, nostalgically looking at the ghats—the most beautiful riverfront one can see for miles. The view was marred by bright advertisements of guest houses, sari shops and travel companies. Almost every boat had an ad painted on it—a jarring interruption in my spiritual sojourn that sent me back to where I came from.
Our urban landscapes back home are full of advertisements. Once upon a time, we recognised taxis as black-and-yellow and autos as green-and-yellow; but now they sell all visible space on their vehicles to advertisers. The same goes for buses or metro trains. On bus boarding stations, you sometimes struggle to read the name of the station, hidden somewhere between advertisements if not overwritten by them. Our night skies are lit up with neon and backlit signage.
Coming to digital real estate, you open any screen and are bombarded with ads of all kinds. Even e-commerce portals, whose primary job is to sell products, are full of ads of other products. When you search for a product you want, all you get is their competing ones that have paid the portal to put them on top.
Once, out of frustration, I wondered if the only place left for advertising was our foreheads. Instantly, a reel popped up on my mobile. A popular comedy influencer was selling casino games. So we have made our craft, talent and personalities all available as advertising real estate. I got my answer—no place is unreachable for the advertiser.
As a consumer, it is mind-numbing to navigate through so many ads and frustrating to wait for the ‘Skip’ button. Still, I want to put on the advertiser’s hat for a moment. What am I gaining by being one among the sea of advertisers? When my advertisement stood out, it probably caught a few eyes. But excessive advertising can be psychologically repulsive, pushing the consumer away. What do I gain when my followers know that their favourite content creator is promoting something that he or she has been paid to promote? Top it with the fact that most followers know influencers probably never consume the products they promote. The trust is low, the recall value non-existent and differentiation unrecognisable.
Differential pricing based on the cost of the gadget used—with the classic example of iPhone users getting quoted higher prices for flights and hotels—makes us think about the invasive nature of advertising. As a consumer, I need to budget that when I am buying an iPhone I am also putting a cess on anything I am going to purchase online using this phone. Is this a breach of my right to equality or quality? Or is it really the online version of an offline behaviour? Is it not common to see tourists being overcharged when the vendor judges them based on their economic behaviour? Even the neighbourhood vegetable vendor charges more if you stop by in a fancy car, so why should high-end phone users not be judged similarly?
I checked out research on ads and their effect on consumers. Almost all the top results talked about manipulating consumer behaviour, but presented it in a way that it seems to help the consumer. They say it helps consumers make informed choices. I wonder how a casino app that promises to multiply your money in a jiffy in advertising, but in practice has a high rate of eroding the wealth of players, would be an informed decision. How do surrogate ads lead to prohibited items empowering the consumer?
There seems to be little research on the ill effects on consumers of too much in-your-face advertisement. Consumers are rarely a single, organised entity, so they have no agency to commission such research. But only such insight can feed into the advertising guidelines by authorities, who in an ideal situation should be the one assessing the impact. Till then, our urban designers and municipal authorities need to establish a fine balance between how much advertisement should be a part of the cityscape. Aesthetics of a place should not be sacrificed at the altar of monetising every possible space available.
On that note, I could distinctly notice the ads on the ghats because I am currently staying at a university campus that has almost zero ads. This stint made me realise how soothing it can be not to be shouted at visually all the time. Else, my urban eyes are too used to ads, trained at ignoring them. Little had I realised that visual noise can indeed be disturbing at a high level. We need to demand our serenity back in the public spaces we collectively own.
Anuradha Goyal
Author and founder of IndiTales
Follow her on X @anuradhagoyal