A poll of Americans’ attitudes to bad ads by InsightsOne finds that more Americans are annoyed by irrelevant pop-up ads (70%) than by male (66%) or female (54%) enhancement ads, and even emails from deceased African leaders who have left them money (64%). Clearly, the light-hearted survey had a fairly loose definition of the term “advertising.” Nevertheless, the results do suggest that relevance matters: 58% said they are annoyed by ads for products and services they do not need.
Overall, 91% of respondents claim to see annoying ads, most often on TV (60%), in emails or sidebar ads (55%), and on websites (52%), a result that possibly just aligns with where they most often notice ads.
88% of respondents said  they’ve been inundated with “online ad spam” and 9 in 10 respondents say they take action in response. Such actions range from unsubscribing from future emails (60%) to leaving a website (36%), stopping use of the product advertised (14%) and completely boycotting the company doing the advertising (13%). Men turned out to be more likely than women to take some actions, such as stopping use of the product (17% vs. 11%) and boycotting the company (16% vs. 10%).
About the Data: The survey was conducted online within the United States by Harris Interactive on behalf of InsightsOne from February 27-March 1, 2013 among 2,111 adults ages 18 and older. This online survey is not based on a probability sample and therefore no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated.
