In today’s world, we are constantly bombarded by messages everywhere we turn. There is a myth that the average American consumer is exposed to 5,000 advertising messages per day – but as mentioned, that is just a myth. Here’s why:

If we assume we get our recommended 8 hours of sleep at night, that leaves 57,600 seconds we are awake per day. To see 5,000 advertising or branding messages per day, that would mean we would have to see one every 11.52 seconds. And, unless you are wearing Google glasses, this is probably highly unlikely. However, people are still exposed to quite a bit of ads on a daily basis. In fact, we are receiving about five times as much information now as we did in 1986.

Even if those ads are within visible eyesight, though, our brain probably sees very few of them in all honesty. The average person’s working memory can handle 40-50 bits of information. It is estimated that our senses are bombarded with over 11 million bits of data, every second! This means we ignore 10,999,950 bits of data every second we are awake.

Talk about scary for advertisers paying millions of dollars to try and make the cut in the tiny window of information actually processed. This is why it is so important to produce interesting and engaging content that breaks through the clutter – and visuals are a great way to do so, particularly infographs.

Images help bypass the noise and clutter since it takes minimal time, precisely 1/10th of a second, to understand a visual. They also increase the willingness to read something in the first place, not to mention they’ve been shown to help with reader comprehension as well.

NeoMam Studios put together a great article about 10 Reasons Why You Should Care About Visual Content, and used, of course, an infograph to conclude their reasonings.

Treat yourself to a scroll through this one – you’ll learn why you couldn’t resist reading the article the whole way through (what a concept!) and why infographs make a difference when it comes to captivating the reader.