- Mark Dolliver

NEW YORK While marketers are adept at getting ads into consumers' faces, consumers are adept at ignoring those messages. In polling for AdweekMedia among members of LinkedIn, few respondents said they pay much heed to most of the ads they see.

The poll posed the multiple-choice question, "Of the ads you see in a typical day, how many engage your attention?" Just 1 percent of respondents picked the answer "most of them," with another 5 percent choosing "many of them." The vast majority of responses were split between "a small minority of them" (66 percent) and "none of them" (25 percent). (To see the full results of this poll, click here. And to take part in another ad-related LinkedIn poll for AdweekMedia, click here.)

Men were more apt than women to say their attention is engaged by none of the ads they see in a typical day (27 percent vs. 22 percent) and correspondingly less apt to say it's engaged by a small minority of them (66 percent vs. 70 percent).

Conventional wisdom says young adults are a particularly difficult audience for advertisers to connect with, and this poll's 18-24-year-olds lived up to that reputation. Twenty-nine percent of them said their attention is engaged by none of the ads they see in a typical day, vs. 24 percent of the 25-34-year-olds and 26 percent of the 35-54 and 55-and-older cohorts.

In a bit of bad news for b-to-b advertisers, owners of businesses were especially likely to say they give their attention to none of the ads they see in a typical day, with 32 percent of them picking that answer. The number was considerably lower (at 22 percent) among respondents who are in "management" positions.

Beware of consultants: 36 percent of respondents in that job classification picked "none of them" as their response, vs. 18 percent of those in "creative" and "sales" positions and 21 percent of those in "marketing" roles.