A Fair Wage For Ad Attention

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What is it worth for you to pay attention?  To pay attention to advertisements?  For people outside the media business, that question probably has a different answer than it does for you or me as MediaPost explains...

The bad news is that Madison Avenue values people at a rate that is considerably below minimum wage. The good news is that most people are okay with that.

To find out what consumers think the fair value exchange is for paying attention to advertising, Research Intelligencer surveyed two samples of American adults about what they feel is a reasonable hourly rate.

The first sample was given multiple choices ranging from $1 to “more than minimum wage” (currently $7.25).

The second sample was asked to provide their own open-ended responses. Interestingly, both surveys yielded similar ranges, and the majority of respondents deemed something less than minimum wage to be a fair value exchange.

The average of the multiple-choice respondents was $3.40, which is close to the actual amount that U.S. advertisers currently spend, in aggregate, to reach the average American per hour of pure advertising time (see related story in today’s edition).

On an open-ended basis, the average was $8.40 -- just over minimum wage. But that average was skewed by some very high-end results -- as much as $100 per hour of advertising attention. (Interestingly, none of the respondents entered an amount higher than $100).

The spread among open-ended respondents was from $0 to $100, although the concentration was in the $1 (25% of respondents), $2 (17.5%), $3 (6.5%), $5 (15%) and $10 (9%) ranges.

The best news of all is that while the hourly rate valuation is mostly theoretical (it’s rare for advertisers to pay consumers directly to pay attention to advertising), respondents to both surveys felt overwhelmingly that “advertising is a fair price to pay” for the ad-supported media it underwrites for them.

More than three-quarters (77.3%) of respondents said advertising was a fair value exchange, while only 10.8% said it was not. Twelve percent said they weren’t sure or did not know.