It's mostly concerned with what Bo and lone already touched on, I suppose.

I remember wondering, once, to myself, as I watched the superbowl in a bar a couple years back, why a server manufacturer, a company from a specialized and highly technical, expensive field, who literally due to the nature of their product could not influence people to go to the store and purchase en masse, would bother to spend the requisite millions for a slot of commercial time, let alone Bowl commercial time.
I believe the company was IBM, or one of its competitors, and I didn't mind - the commercial was one of the most entertaining of the crop that year - but the wonder turned into an itch and I voiced it to my mates, and managed to get one solid answer out of it:

Product Awareness.

The two biggest misconceptions about advertising are that A.) the effect is a conscious and direct one, and B.) we're all too smart to buy their bullsh*t. The effect, in reality, is a subversive and suggestive one, and in fact partially relies on your belief that you're above such petty things. Anything you believe you're above, or beyond, you do not give full credence to, and it thereby gets to take advantage of a distracted, lax mind (an odd, stretching-it, but apt somehow parallel would be the old racial example, where the racist in question, who assuredly knows that colored folk are only capable of so much, allows them to do as the will on their own time, and then he finds somehow one learned how to read).
The only people who aren't really affected by advertisements are those who don't watch them.

It gave IBM a real, bona fide edge to insert itself into the homes of those many millions - and it's good to remember that at the broader levels there are hundreds and hundreds of millions of potential viewers, and only a very, very small percentage of them needs to get the message for the profit margins to begin to rise amiably in your favor (for one thing, it helps stimulate a business's single greatest asset: word of mouth) - and it's even better to remember that, often enough, the percentage that gets the message and makes the purchase is going to be much larger.

So, I'd say that your question is somewhat misguided: I don't think people who have directly, and consciously, with full awareness of an ad-to-purchase causation, been influenced to buy something, actually exist.

i would be hard pressed to remember a time where i actually bought something based on an ad. mostly i ignore it as white noise. sometimes i take an interest in an ad, but its more curiosity then consumer interest. maybe if there was more gaming ads i would buy more but so far meh.

i am more influenced by word of mouth. i buy things that ive had before or others have recommended to me. a products rep should transcend the lies blathered in ads.

I guess I just underestimate product awareness. I just find it hard to believe that the cost of ads (which is probably a few cents per view or something) will be able to turn out a profit. And it's also impossible to measure if the ads are, in fact, producing an increase in products sold due to product awareness.

And now to something humorous:



Translation:

We apologize for not forcing you to watch an ad.

Because this is free like every other web streaming site, you should watch these. And because it's not working, you should fix it.

If ads continue to not work, we actually expect you to email someone in order to get ads working properly again. We are very stupid.

I think a good example would probably be the relationship between movies, trailers, and ticket/dvd sales. Hype is everything - 300 proves that. In the creative world, hype can even get you an award - look how Eminem beat out a world-class album with his back-of-the-class dross for a Grammy.

Another something humorous:



'cause we laughed there.