[jyl]

I totally ignore conventional Internet advertising (banners, skyscrapers, clickable pics, links, popups, etc). At best, it irritates me. At worst, it doesn't even register.

I totally ignore unsolicited email advertising. Most of it gets caught by my spam filter and what doesn't gets added to the spam blacklist.

I do my best to ignore TV advertising. 100% of our TV viewing is via TiVo and we fast-forward through all the ads. TV ads are irritating and tedious - as if the people making them think of the audience as captive, tied to a chair with eyes propped open, so that the ads are designed to make the maximum impact on the unwilling brain. When they do stumble out an interesting or funny ad, they run it every 1/2 hour so it quickly becomes irritating.

I ignore newspaper ads. I'm just skimming the paper anyway, so its easy to skim over the ads. I used to pay attention to the Sunday inserts (for computers and electronics and hardware) until they reached 1/3rd of the weight of the entire Sunday paper, then I started just throwing them out en masse, without a glance.

I ignore ads in general interest magazines (Newsweek, etc). Kind of like newspapers.

I screen all phone calls, so you can imagine my response to telemarketers.

I pay attention to ads in enthusiast magazine ads. Normally I'm very interested in the topic of the magazine, the topic of the ad is the same topic, and I'm reading those magazines cover to cover, not skimming.

I pay attention to most catalogs. They get saved for reference, idly picked up and read, dog-eared for X-mas, etc.

I pay attention to emails that I have subscribed to. For example, I get one from AJ USA that I read quite carefully each month.

I pay a lot of amount of attention to word of mouth advertising. I consider internet discussion forums like this to be among the best word of mouth advertising.