Every marketer feels it, but few put a number on it.
The amount of media a customer consumes keeps growing (and at a staggering rate), the number of places that will sell you a slice of it keeps growing faster (and at an even more staggering rate), and the number most teams use to judge all of it hasn’t changed in fifteen years.
This is the first of eight articles drawn from our Future North 2026 talk, Today through Tomorrow, on how high-growth brands deliver predictable performance from paid media.
It starts where the problem starts: with the noise.
How much media is there?
Two UK media outlets measure this better than anyone (and this initial presentation took place in the UK). Ofcom’s Online Nation puts the average adult at roughly four and a half hours a day online, most of it on a phone, and the figure has climbed by about an hour over five years. IPA TouchPoints, which measures the whole media day including simultaneous use, puts the total nearer eight hours. The US runs higher still: Nielsen’s Total Audience reporting and eMarketer’s time-spent estimates put US adults at roughly twelve to thirteen hours a day with media once simultaneous use is counted, and digital media accounts for the majority.
The point here isn’t the exact hours but rather it’s that a customer’s day is now almost entirely addressable, with almost every hour of it is for sale.
How many places sell media and attention?
When I built the ecosystem slide for the talk, I grouped the market by how media is actually bought rather than by platform owners.
Nine distinct categories came out:
- Search & AI/LLMS (ex. Google, ChatGPT, etc.)
- Social Media (ex. Facebook, TikTok, Instagram)
- Video & Connected TV (ex. YouTube, Prime Video, etc.)
- Retail Media
- Programmatic and Native Ads (ex. display ads on websites and apps)
- Audio Advertising (ex. Radio, Spotify, etc.)
- Affiliates and Partners (ex. bloggers, publishers, content creators, etc.)
- Out of Home (ex. Billboards, gas station screens, etc.)
- Gaming, Apps and Messaging
Inside those nine sat more than fifty named places to spend including: Google and Microsoft; Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, Reddit, LinkedIn; YouTube, ITVX, Sky AdSmart, Netflix and Prime Video; Amazon, Tesco’s dunnhumby, Nectar360, Boots; the trade desks and native networks; Spotify and the podcast networks; Awin and the creator economy; and the digital billboard operators.
More than half of those didn’t exist as advertising channels five years ago. And even the ones that did didn’t have nearly as many touch points or advertising opportunities as they do now.
How Many Ads Does a Person See Each Day?
It’s often sited that people see between 5,000 to 10,000 ads per day. There are two sides to that claim. The proof or research behind it doesn’t seem to be readily available nor does the reference to “ads” make the picture all that clear.
If you step back and consider “Brand Interactions” in place of purely just ads, it’s very easy to see how quickly this figure can add up.
Why the “noise” shows up in your ROAS
Here is the practical consequence. Your return on ad spend moves every month for reasons that have nothing to do with your ads. There are things inside your business that you generally have control over, but then there are external environmental factors that push on your business and are outside of your control.
What’s inside the business that you Control?
This includes things like product mix and margin, the promotional calendar, stock-outs, a checkout change, creative fatigue, an email send landing the same week, someone adjusting the attribution window.
What’s outside of your business and your control?
This includes seasonality, competitors bidding in the same auctions (the UK ad market alone passed £40 billion in 2024 and US internet advertising revenue alone was around $260 billion the same year, all of it competing for the same inventory you are), consumer confidence, weather, and platform and privacy changes.
This isn’t straight additive arithmetic – same ads, same budget, different number. When the environment is this noisy, a single efficiency ratio can’t tell you whether your media buyer did anything at all.
What cutting through media “noise” actually means
Noise isn’t solved by picking the right platform. It’s solved by giving the money rules, a fixed share for what’s proven, a fixed share for pushing proven channels into new territory, and a small, disciplined share for testing the new thing with a stop-loss written before the first dollar is spent. That’s the 70/20/10 rule that we use at Corkboard.
The honest first step, though, is smaller: admit that the number you’re judging all of this by was built for a quieter world. Part 2 explains why it’s also bigger than the sales it describes.
How High-Growth Brands Make Paid Media Predictable
These articles came out of a presentation titled “How High-Growth Brands Make Paid Media Predictable” by Jordan Atchison, Co-founder and CMO of Corkboard Concepts, at Reach Studio’s Future Ready Digital: North conference in September 2026. Jordan’s presentation took place in Sheffield, England, alongside presentations from SEMrush, Trustpilot, dot.digital and Google.
It is a reference to the combination of rising media consumption, a growing number of advertising channels and the internal and external factors that move performance metrics independently of the ads themselves. It makes single-metric judgement unreliable.
It is an unmeasured estimate from 2007. No study has verified it, and the “10,000” version has no identifiable source. Treat it as folklore.
Compare the month’s change against the internal and external factors above before crediting or blaming the media. Then measure efficiency with a number that doesn’t come from any platform — Marketing Efficiency Ratio, covered in part 5.