By Denis Hay
Description
Advertising is everywhere in Australia. This article explains how constant exposure shapes behaviour and democracy, and what citizens can do to push back.
Introduction – Living Inside Advertising
From breakfast television to roadside billboards, shopping centres, petrol browsers, phones, and paid streaming services, Australians are exposed to a constant stream of commercial messaging. This is no longer occasional persuasion. It is an environment. Understanding the advertising influence on society begins with recognising that exposure is now largely unavoidable.
The Problem – When Advertising Becomes Inescapable
Advertising saturation in public and private spaces
Advertising saturation now extends across television, radio, digital billboards, buses, lifts, stadiums, and online news. Even spaces once considered civic or neutral are increasingly leased to commercial messaging. Research shows repetition, not argument, drives advertising effectiveness.
Source: theconversation.com – Why advertising feels inescapable.
The attention economy in Australia
In Australia’s attention economy, human focus is the commodity. Advertising competes by amplifying urgency, fear, and status anxiety. Over time, consumption is framed not as a choice but as identity, reinforcing neoliberal values and weakening collective thinking.
Source: Taylor & Francis – Advertising and consumer socialisation.
The Impact – What Constant Advertising Does to People
Psychological and social effects
Heavy exposure is linked to dissatisfaction, impulse spending, and normalised debt. Children are particularly vulnerable, forming brand loyalty before critical thinking develops.
Source: APA.org: The Psychological Impact of Advertising
Democratic and civic consequences
Advertising crowds out civic information. Political messaging becomes simplified and emotional, while media outlets become more dependent on advertisers than on audiences. Even public broadcasters such as the ABC and SBS now face increasing commercial pressure.
The Solution – Reclaiming Attention and Public Space
What can individuals do, and how can they implement it?
- Use privacy browsers and ad blockers
Switch to a browser such as Firefox or Brave and install a reputable ad blocker, such as uBlock Origin. On mobile devices, privacy-focused browsers significantly reduce tracking and autoplay advertising without reducing functionality. - Disable personalised advertising
Turn off ad personalisation in Google, Meta, and streaming device settings. Disable interest-based ads and activity tracking. Ads may still appear, but they lose much of their behavioural impact. - Limit screen-based media deliberately
Avoid watching TV in the background, set specific times for news or social media, and keep phones away from meals. Replacing passive exposure with intentional use breaks the constant advertising loop. - Support ad-free and public-interest media
Actively use and support media that prioritise public value over clicks and advertisers. Subscriptions, donations, and engagement all strengthen non-commercial media models.
What governments could do instead?
Australia does not need wall-to-wall advertising to function. As a nation with full dollar sovereignty, governments can fund public communication, transport infrastructure, and cultural spaces directly with public funds.
A clear starting point would be to fully fund national public broadcasters, particularly the ABC and especially SBS, so they are not forced to rely on advertising revenue. SBS was created to deliver high-quality multilingual and multicultural programming in the public interest. Today, frequent ad breaks, often several within a short segment, interrupt content and undermine the purpose of a public broadcaster.
With secure public funding, these broadcasters could:
- Eliminate or drastically reduce advertising.
- Provide uninterrupted programming.
- Invest in Australian-made and culturally diverse content.
- Strengthen independent journalism free from commercial pressure.
Beyond broadcasting, governments could also restrict outdoor and digital billboards, create ad-free public transport zones, and protect civic spaces from constant marketing intrusion.
Advertising saturation is not inevitable. It is the result of policy choices.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is advertising really harmful?
It becomes harmful when it is unavoidable, psychologically manipulative and replaces civic communication.
Can people opt out completely?
Not entirely. Outdoor, broadcast, and public-space advertising remain largely unavoidable.
Why do governments allow this?
Advertising revenue shifts costs away from public funding and onto attention, even when social costs are high.
Final Thoughts – A Society Worth Protecting
Advertising will always exist, but saturation is a choice. Reducing the influence of advertising on society is about restoring attention, dignity, and democratic space, and recognising that public purpose should outweigh commercial convenience.
What’s Your Experience?
Where do you feel advertising intrudes most on your daily life?
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Engaging Question
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This article was originally published on Social Justice Australia
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“Where do you feel advertising intrudes most on your daily life?”
It doesn’t intrude on me at all because I just don’t take any notice of in it’s many and varied forms.
4 different adverts before the second paragraph …
Have you considered a subscription model (a la defector.com) ?
Martin, did you click on a link to the article in either of Facebook, Twitter or Threads?
If so, this will explain all those ads:
https://theaimn.net/those-ads-the-annoying-ones-they-are-not-ours-but-heres-what-you-can-do-about-them/
More pernicious than being exposed to advertising, is embedded corporate sponsorship and repetitive political themes and wedges used to shape perceptions and condition audience across media channels.
One can infer influence of fossil fueled Atlas Koch with climate science denial, anti-renewables etc talking points and Tanton Network on ‘mass immigration’ and ‘unsustainable population’ to imply ‘the great replacement’.
Rinse and repeat….
Vyvian Raoul, Matt Bonner:
Advertising Shits in Your Head
(Strategies for Resistance)
2019 PM Pess
Advertising is a creeping, expanding, likely fatal pox on civilised discourse, reasoning, attitude, prudence, terminally haemorrhoidially fatal. Have you ever met a keen advertising type? Subsimian garbage. By contrast, maggots are loveable.
Thanks for sharing that, GL. Many people do consciously tune advertising out, and that awareness definitely reduces its impact on an individual level.
One point the article tries to make, though, is that saturation still operates in the background. Even when we are not actively engaging with ads, constant exposure helps normalise consumer messages, shapes public space, and influences media funding and political communication more broadly.
So while personal resistance matters, the wider issue is what wall-to-wall advertising does to society as a whole, especially to children, public broadcasting, and civic space.
Appreciate you adding your perspective to the discussion.
Thanks Martin. That’s interesting, because I don’t place ads within articles at all. What different readers see can vary depending on browser, device, network, or whether the link was opened inside Facebook.
If you’re seeing injected ads, they’re not coming from me, and they’re something I’m trying to minimise rather than add to.
I agree, Andrew. Embedded sponsorship and coordinated messaging can be far more influential than overt advertising because it often presents itself as neutral analysis or common sense rather than promotion.
When particular narratives are repeated across multiple outlets and platforms, especially around climate, energy, or migration, they start to feel like background reality rather than contested ideas. That repetition is powerful precisely because it avoids looking like advertising at all.
One of the concerns I was trying to highlight is that this kind of influence operates through saturation, consistency and emotional framing, rather than evidence. It shapes the boundaries of what feels reasonable to discuss, which is why media literacy and strong, genuinely independent public-interest media matter so much.
Thanks for adding that context.
I understand the frustration you’re expressing, Phil. A lot of people feel that constant commercial messaging corrodes public conversation and narrows how we think about value, purpose and success.
One thing I’m trying to keep the focus on, though, is how advertising operates as a system rather than as a reflection of individual character. Many people working in advertising are responding to incentives and structures they didn’t design, while the real damage comes from how deeply commercial logic has been allowed to permeate public space, media and politics.
That’s why the question of limits, funding public-interest media, and protecting civic space matters more than venting, however understandable that impulse is.
Thanks for that, Xyz. Are you pointing readers to Raoul and Bonner’s book as a deeper dive into how advertising shapes thinking and ways people can resist it? If so, that’s a useful reference.
One of the best satires about advertising that has been around for decades:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants
Denis, long ago, I studied Vance Packard and others on this topic area, and still read widely while investigating. But venting is a “last outburst”. Your work and these comments are useful. I hate T V intrusive stupid ads strongly and commandeer the remote, to my wife’s irrits…
Phil
I do the same thing. I turn the sound off while the ads are playing. They irritate me no end.
An interesting read, GL.
The industry is basically set up to to provide an environment that is advertiser-friendly.
The comments are interesting, but I thnk god my wrinklies taught me how to read and write- half the advertising these days is near-subceptional so teev seems to be a bit about brainwashing against tthe claim offered that ads are “information”.
Whole rows of TV stations are about the place now, including the inane hawking of junk without a break on some stations.
Ah, televisions, or as Harlan Ellison called them The Glass Teat. Have a read of The Glass Teat: Essays of Opinion on Television (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Glass_Teat) and The Other Glass Teat. Amazingly, they are still as relevant today as they were 40+ years ago.
@ GL, Denis Hay, PP, paul walter ….. I watch too much television and have discovered the ”Ten Ad Set” that is blasted across the screen often at the most inappropriate moment in the movie. So switching off the sound is a good positive response, or some channel surfing, that too often mirrors the same advertising schedule of the other channels.
Who said that masturbation was the thinking man’s T V advertising? Nice…