I have been thinking about advertising differently lately.
Not simply as commerce. Not simply as companies telling us that a product exists.
Advertising is deliberately designed to enter attention, create associations, trigger emotion, establish familiarity, and influence behavior. That does not make advertising literal mind control. A billboard cannot force someone to buy something.
But advertising is absolutely an attempt to shape cognition.
Once I started looking at it that way, another question became harder to ignore:
What happens when the person receiving that influence cannot easily shut it out?
For many autistic people, that question matters.
When shopping becomes sensory advertising
I like shopping at Aldi.
The store itself works well for me in many ways. But one part of the experience can be extremely difficult: loud promotional announcements designed to grab attention and influence purchasing.
The voices are energetic, theatrical, repetitive, and deliberately hard to ignore.
Even with noise-canceling headphones, they can break through.
For many shoppers, this may register as ordinary retail noise.
For me, it can become something different.
Once the sound reaches my attention, I cannot necessarily decide to discard it. It may continue echoing afterward.
That distinction matters.
The problem is not that I cannot decide whether to buy the product. The problem is that I cannot reliably decide whether the attempt to influence me enters my cognitive space in the first place.
I am there because I need groceries.
I am not voluntarily entering an advertising experience.
That turns what looks like ordinary marketing into a question of accessibility.
“Just ignore it” is not a real answer
People often treat advertising as harmless because they assume we can simply tune it out.
For many people, perhaps that works reasonably well.
For many autistic people, it may not.
A sound, phrase, image, rhythm, slogan, face, color pattern, or visual arrangement can continue repeating internally long after the original stimulus has disappeared.
I often think of these as echoes.
Something enters the nervous system and keeps circulating.
That means an advertisement can remain present even after the screen is gone or the speaker goes quiet.
This is where the phrase “just ignore it” breaks down.
Ignoring something requires the brain to successfully classify it as irrelevant and suppress it.
That ability is not identical across human beings.
And advertising is frequently designed to do the opposite.
It is designed to resist being ignored.
It uses repetition, novelty, bright color, motion, humor, sexuality, fear, aspiration, music, social status, and emotional association specifically because these things make information harder to discard.
So when someone says, “Just ignore the advertisements,” they may actually be asking another person’s nervous system to perform a filtering function that is difficult or sometimes impossible for them.
I once left a gym because of advertising
I had a similar problem at a gym where Red Bull advertising seemed to be everywhere.
Bright graphics. Logos. Flashy commercial imagery. Wherever I looked while exercising, another advertisement was competing for my attention.
Eventually I wrote to the gym and told them something that probably sounded unusual:
I would actually pay more not to have to look at advertising while I exercised.
I was not offended by Red Bull.
I simply wanted somewhere my attention was not constantly being purchased by somebody else.
Eventually I solved the problem by leaving the gym.
That worked because a gym is replaceable.
Grocery shopping is different.
There are parts of everyday life that cannot simply be abandoned every time the sensory environment becomes hostile.
That is where this stops being only a personal preference and starts becoming an accessibility question.
I still remember the Marlboro Man
Growing up in Montana, I remember the Marlboro Man.
The campaign did not simply advertise cigarettes.
It attached smoking to masculinity, independence, toughness, freedom, self-reliance, and the mythology of the American West.
In Montana, that imagery felt culturally familiar.
The cowboy was not random.
He represented an identity.
The cigarette became associated with the identity.
That is far more powerful than simply saying:
Here is tobacco. Would you like to buy some?
The message was closer to:
This is what a certain kind of man looks like.
The irony is difficult to miss. Several men associated with portraying the Marlboro Man later died from smoking-related illnesses, including lung cancer.
But another part of that story matters to me personally:
I never smoked tobacco.
And yet I can still remember the campaign decades later.
That is significant.
The advertisement did not convert me into a customer.
But it still occupied part of my memory.
It still created an association strong enough to survive across decades.
That shows something important about advertising:
Advertising does not have to produce a purchase to produce an effect.
It can leave behind an image.
A feeling.
A social category.
A definition of masculinity.
A craving.
A slogan.
A memory.
A mental pathway.
The sale is only one possible outcome.
We already accept this argument when it comes to children
Society already recognizes that not every human mind should be treated identically by advertisers.
Children are the clearest example.
Many countries restrict advertising to children because children may be more vulnerable to persuasive techniques or less able to understand commercial intent.
The principle behind those protections matters.
We have already decided that:
The characteristics of the person receiving persuasion matter.
We do not simply say:
“An advertisement is an advertisement. Everyone receives the same thing.”
We recognize developmental differences.
We recognize differences in vulnerability.
We recognize that persuasion can affect different minds differently.
That raises an obvious question.
What about neurological differences?
Autistic adults are not children.
This is not an argument for treating autistic people as incapable of making decisions.
It is almost the opposite.
It is an argument for autonomy.
The issue is not:
Autistic people are too vulnerable to be exposed to advertising.
The issue is:
People should have meaningful control over how much commercially engineered sensory input they are required to absorb.
Those are very different ideas.
I do not want someone deciding what I am allowed to see.
I want some ability to choose when I am being subjected to deliberate commercial attempts to capture my attention.
Advertising can become an accessibility issue
Consider places such as:
- hospitals
- clinics
- public transportation
- government offices
- schools
- supermarkets
- gyms
- waiting rooms
- airports
- community centers
Many of these places are difficult or impossible to avoid.
Now imagine those environments filled with animated displays, repeating audio, bright promotions, jingles, moving text, branded screens, and competing commercial messages.
For one person, this may fade into the background.
For another person, it can contribute to sensory overload.
That means accessibility cannot only mean:
Can someone physically enter this building?
It should also include:
Can their nervous system reasonably tolerate being there?
This is where advertising becomes different from necessary environmental information.
A train departure board has a functional purpose.
A safety announcement has a functional purpose.
A sign telling me where the restroom is has a functional purpose.
A loud promotional announcement has another purpose entirely.
It wants my attention.
Cognitive accessibility
We understand physical accessibility fairly easily.
A wheelchair user needs a route through a building.
A Deaf person may need captions.
A blind person may need information presented non-visually.
Cognitive and sensory accessibility asks another question:
Can a person use the environment without being subjected to unnecessary cognitive load?
Advertising is particularly interesting because much of that cognitive load is intentional.
The flashing screen is not flashing because the building requires it to function.
It is flashing because somebody wants you to notice it.
The sound is not repeating because you need the information.
It is repeating because repetition improves recall.
The colors are not bright by accident.
The slogan is not short by accident.
The jingle is not catchy by accident.
These systems are engineered specifically to enter memory.
For someone who already has difficulty filtering sensory information, that design can become highly intrusive.
The price of “free” information
This problem is not limited to physical spaces.
Increasingly, even searching for basic information online comes with a cognitive or data-protection price.
The information may technically be free, but accessing it often requires payment in other forms:
- attention
- personal data
- behavioral tracking
- cognitive effort
- exposure to advertising
- repeated interruptions
Before reaching the information itself, a person may have to reject cookies, close a newsletter prompt, dismiss notification requests, scroll past sponsored results, distinguish actual content from advertising, and navigate pages deliberately designed to capture attention.
That is not a monetary price.
But it is still a price.
For someone whose brain does not easily discard unwanted sensory or cognitive input, those interruptions may become part of the mental workload long after the page has been closed.
This creates another useful distinction:
Free does not necessarily mean without cost.
Sometimes the currency is your attention.
Sometimes it is your personal data.
Sometimes it is your cognitive bandwidth.
And increasingly, the paid option is simply the version that removes those costs.
That raises a broader issue of cognitive sovereignty: how much control a person has over what is allowed to enter, interrupt, track, profile, and compete for their attention.
The issue is not banning advertising
I do not think the most useful starting point is:
Ban advertising.
There is a much more practical idea.
Give people an option.
Businesses and public spaces could establish advertising-free or low-advertising hours.
During those periods:
- commercial screens could be switched off
- promotional audio could stop
- animated promotions could become static
- essential information could remain visible
- lighting and sound could remain predictable
- commercial messaging could be minimized
A supermarket might announce:
Sensory-accessible hours: 14:00–16:00. No promotional audio or animated advertising.
A gym could do something similar.
A shopping center could designate low-commercial-stimulation areas.
Transit systems could keep certain carriages or waiting areas free from animated and audio advertising.
This would not require eliminating advertising.
It would introduce choice.
And nobody should have to prove why they need it
This part matters.
Accessibility can sometimes become another bureaucracy.
Prove your disability.
Produce documentation.
Explain your diagnosis.
Ask an employee for permission.
Justify why the environment is difficult.
That can undermine the autonomy accessibility was supposed to create.
A better model is environmental choice.
A quiet train carriage does not need to know why I chose it.
A sensory-friendly supermarket hour does not need my medical history.
An advertising-free gym period does not need to know whether I am autistic, have migraines, ADHD, PTSD, sensory-processing differences, or simply prefer exercising without commercial messages surrounding me.
The environment is available.
You choose it.
That is enough.
Good accessibility usually helps more people than expected
This is a pattern we see repeatedly.
Curb cuts help wheelchair users.
They also help parents with strollers, travelers with luggage, delivery workers, and cyclists.
Captions help Deaf people.
They also help people learning a language, people watching video in noisy spaces, and people who simply process written language better.
The same would likely happen with low-advertising environments.
Some autistic people would benefit.
So would people with migraines.
People with attention difficulties.
People who are exhausted.
People who are grieving.
People who simply want quiet.
And perhaps people who have never realized how much of their attention is being continuously competed for.
Then, an hour later, it happened
About an hour after working through these ideas, I had to pick up a few groceries.
So I went to Aldi.
Of course, as soon as I walked in, the promotional puppets were activated.
The loud voices started.
I turned my head to the right.
And there, on the shelf, was a Red Bull.
I had just spent an hour thinking and writing about both of these things.
The Aldi announcements.
The Red Bull advertising from the gym.
And now, within seconds of entering the store, both were back in my attention.
I did not buy the Red Bull.
That is not really the point.
The point is what happened before any purchasing decision existed.
A commercial sound entered my hearing.
My attention shifted.
A brand entered my visual field.
A previous memory became active.
The associations connected.
That entire process happened before I had made any decision about whether I wanted it to happen.
That is the part of advertising we rarely talk about.
Advertising does not have to control what I buy to influence what enters my mind.
Sometimes simply getting my attention is the product.
The deeper issue is ownership of attention
Advertising pays for things.
It supports media, websites, events, businesses, and services.
That economic reality should not simply be dismissed.
But attention is also a resource.
We increasingly recognize privacy as something individuals have a legitimate interest in controlling.
Perhaps we need a similar conversation about attention.
Not an absolute right never to encounter persuasion.
Something more practical:
A right to reasonable spaces and periods in which nobody is deliberately attempting to manipulate your attention for commercial purposes.
That would especially benefit people whose sensory and cognitive systems make disengagement difficult.
But I suspect a lot of other people would discover they liked those spaces too.
There is something surprisingly peaceful about entering a place where nothing is trying to sell itself to you.
No mascot.
No jingle.
No flashing screen.
No carefully engineered craving.
No cowboy defining masculinity.
No promotional voice cutting through your headphones while you are trying to buy groceries.
Just the gym.
Just the train.
Just the grocery store.
Just the world.
And for a little while,
your attention belongs entirely to you.
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