The worrying findings are from a survey carried out by research firm Yankelovich Partners which is being presented to senior ad agency bosses at the 2004 management conference of the American Association of Advertising Agencies in Miami.
The survey comes against a background of increasing difficulty of reaching certain consumer groups with traditional advertising, as ad avoidance, fuelled by technology such as personal video recorders or pop-up blockers online, grows.
The results of the survey reported today in the New York Times echo comments made earlier this year by Procter & Gamble's marketing chief Jim Stengel, who said that advertisers must look beyond the 30-second television spot and create advertising that viewers want to see.
Stengel said that the industry was not changing its mentality nor processes with regard to media plans and that measurement had not evolved. "There must be, and is, life beyond the 30-second spot. But our systems still revolve around that," he said.
J. Walker Smith, president at Yankelovich, said the survey had found that consumers increasingly have problems with advertising, as it looks for ever more ways to connect with consumers.
Just this week Google has run into problems with its planned free web based emails system Gmail, which has been accused by a US senator of invading people's privacy.
"People have a love-hate relationship with advertising. But a far greater percentage are saying they have concerns, primarily related to its growing obtrusiveness," Smith told the New York Times.
Some of the highlights of the survey show that 54% of respondents avoid buying products that overwhelm them with advertising and marketing messages.
Another 60% have said that their opinion of advertising is now much more negative than a few years ago.
Perhaps more worryingly, as many as 61% of those surveyed said that they thought that the amount of advertising they are exposed to "is out of control" and 69% said they were interested in products like TiVo "that would help them skip or block marketing".
Smith told the NY Times that the results offered little comfort for agencies. Part of the problem was that the brand and the marketing had become indistinguishable.
"The marketing itself has become part of how consumers view a brand, so if you have two brands at parity with each other, more and more the one people are likely to do business with is the one that does a better job in reaching them with its advertising," he said.
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