Investigation into the Florida’s Black Hole of Marketing Dollars

Listen, I’m going to tell you something that every advertising executive in Florida already knows but will never admit while sober: advertising in Florida is about as effective as a screen door on a submarine. It’s a beautifully choreographed dance of futility, a multi-billion-dollar industry built on the foundation of human beings actively, aggressively, and creatively ignoring everything you’re trying to tell them.

And nowhere is this truer than in Florida, where the population has developed an almost supernatural ability to tune out commercial messages while simultaneously maintaining the attention span of a caffeinated hummingbird.

The Billboard Paradox: High-Speed Ignorance on I-95

Let’s start with the crown jewel of worthless advertising: billboards. Specifically, the billboards lining I-95, that magnificent concrete river of road rage and poor life choices that runs through Florida like a scar.

Picture this: You’re driving 75 miles per hour (which in Florida means you’re the slowest person on the road and everyone hates you). You’re surrounded by a Camry with a missing bumper, a lifted truck whose driver is definitely named Kyle, and a Mercedes driven by someone’s grandfather who may or may not still have a valid license. The sun is attempting to murder you through your windshield. Your air conditioning is fighting for its life.

And some personal injury attorney named Morgan & Morgan & Morgan & Also Steve thinks THIS is the moment you’re going to carefully read their billboard, process the information, commit their phone number to memory, and later—in a moment of crisis—recall this specific advertisement from the seventy-three thousand other billboards you’ve passed.

The only time anyone has ever paid attention to a billboard on I-95 is when looking at it CAUSED the accident they’ll eventually need that personal injury lawyer for. It’s the circle of life, Florida edition.

These billboards cost anywhere from $2,500 to $15,000 per month, and their primary function is to give passengers something to read out loud while the driver pretends to listen. “Hurt in an accident? Call 1-800-HURT-NOW.” Cool, let me just grab my pen while I’m merging into the suicide lane at highway speeds.

Television Commercials: The Mute Button’s Finest Hour

Now let’s talk about TV advertising, which has become an elaborate game of chicken between advertisers and the human attention span—and the attention span is winning by a landslide.

Florida has a unique demographic: retirees who’ve earned the right to not give a damn about your product, tourists who don’t live here and will forget your business exists the moment they cross state lines, and working people who are too busy trying to afford rent to care about your boutique anything.

When your commercial comes on, here’s what actually happens:

1. 60% of viewers immediately mute the TV
2. 30% use it as a signal to go to the bathroom, refill their drink, or check their phones
3. 9% are already asleep
4. The remaining 1% are watching, but only because they’re paralyzed by the uncanny valley effect of your spokesperson’s veneers

Do you know what the most effective TV advertising in Florida actually is? When your commercial is so bewilderingly bad that people talk about it ironically. Remember the “1-877-KARS-4-KIDS” jingle? People don’t donate because they were persuaded. They donate to make the psychological torment stop.

Florida TV advertising has devolved into an arms race of who can be the most aggressively mediocre. Car dealerships featuring the owner’s nephew who “totally has stage presence.” Law firms with production values that scream “we spent our entire budget on the settlement, not the commercial.” And don’t even get me started on the local restaurant commercials that look like someone’s dad discovered Windows Movie Maker and had a vision.

Google Ads: Paying Premium Prices for Accidental Clicks

Ah, Google Ads. The digital equivalent of standing in the town square and screaming about your business while everyone walks past wearing AirPods.

Here’s how Google Ads work in Florida: You pay $15-50 every time someone clicks your ad. Sounds reasonable, right? Except let’s examine who’s actually clicking:

• Grandma Pearl, who thought she was clicking on the organic result and is now confused about why this website looks different
• Teenagers clicking everything because they’re bored in algebra class
• Your competitors checking to see how much you’re spending
• Bots. So many bots. An entire digital ecosystem of bots clicking things for reasons we’ll never understand
• That one guy who clicks every ad because he thinks it costs YOU money (it does) and he finds that hilarious (it is)

The conversion rate on most Google Ads in Florida hovers somewhere between “statistically insignificant” and “your intern accidentally clicked it twice.” You’re essentially paying Google premium prices to briefly annoy people who were already trying to find what you sell.

And the keywords! Oh, the keywords. Every personal injury attorney in Florida is bidding on “car accident lawyer Florida,” driving the cost-per-click to the GDP of a small nation. Meanwhile, the people actually searching that term are either lawyers themselves doing research, true crime enthusiasts, or someone who already hired a lawyer and is now just being nosy about what else is out there.

The Google Ads rep will tell you about “impressions” and “brand awareness” and other mystical concepts that basically mean “yes, people saw your ad, and no, they didn’t care.”

Direct Mail: From Mailbox to Recycling Bin Speedrun

Direct mail in Florida is a special kind of wasteful because it combines environmental destruction with complete ineffectiveness—a two-for-one deal on futility.

Here’s the journey of your $10,000 direct mail campaign:

1. Arrives in mailbox
2. Resident collects mail while thinking about literally anything else
3. Sorts mail directly over recycling bin
4. Your postcard/flyer/letter goes immediately into said bin without being read
5. Occasionally, someone’s kid turns it into a paper airplane first (congratulations, you’ve created 3 additional seconds of engagement)

The only exception is elderly Floridians who grew up believing that all mail is important and must be reviewed carefully. These sweet souls will actually read your mailer, consider your offer, and then forget about it by the time they finish their afternoon iced tea.

The tragedy of direct mail is that it’s expensive, environmentally questionable, and competing with credit card offers, Medicare supplement pitches, and those Val-Pak coupon envelopes that no one under 60 even opens anymore. Your carefully crafted message about your new dental practice is sandwiched between a coupon for $5 off an oil change and a flyer for a seafood buffet that has definitely failed at least two health inspections.

The response rate for direct mail in Florida is approximately 0.5-2%. And that’s being generous. That’s assuming “response” means they even looked at it before recycling it, not that they actually bought anything.

Email Marketing: The Spam Folder’s Greatest Hits

Email marketing is where businesses go to feel like they’re doing something while actually accomplishing nothing.

Your subject line game doesn’t matter. Your personalization doesn’t matter. Your A/B testing doesn’t matter. Because here’s the dirty secret: if the recipient doesn’t personally know you, your email is going straight to spam, or worse, the “Promotions” tab in Gmail—that digital purgatory where marketing emails go to die unmourned.

Florida email inboxes are battlegrounds. Everyone is getting:

• Pharmacy spam promising medications at suspicious prices
• Cruise line promotions (we live in Florida, we’re already on the cruise)
• Time-share exit scheme pitches
• “Nigerian prince” emails (now with Florida Man updates!)
• Legitimate businesses trying to market themselves, indistinguishable from all the above

The open rate for marketing emails averages around 20%, which sounds promising until you realize “opening” an email often means “accidentally tapped it on mobile while trying to hit delete” or “opened it to find the unsubscribe link.”

And even if someone opens your email, reads it, and thinks “huh, that’s interesting,” the likelihood of them taking action is roughly equivalent to the likelihood of a Florida summer day without humidity. Theoretically possible, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

The Fundamental Problem: Ad Blindness in the Age of Assault

Here’s the existential crisis at the heart of Florida advertising: people have developed sophisticated psychological defense mechanisms against advertising. We’re not in the 1960s anymore when three TV channels and a newspaper could capture everyone’s attention.

The average person in Florida is exposed to somewhere between 4,000-10,000 advertisements per day. That’s not a typo. Per. Day.

The human brain has responded to this assault the same way Florida wildlife responds to hurricanes: by developing survival instincts. We scroll past. We mute. We skip. We install ad blockers. We train our eyes to literally not see banner ads—”banner blindness” is a documented phenomenon where users’ eyes skip right over anything that looks like an ad.

Florida residents have taken this to an Olympic level because we’re bombarded with more ads than most places:

• Tourist industry advertising (we don’t care, we already live here)
• Real estate advertising (we’re either already locked into a mortgage or priced out forever)
• Personal injury attorneys (there are more of them than palm trees)
• Medicare supplements (relevant to 30% of the population, ignored by the rest)
• Time-shares (no, we don’t want to attend your “free” dinner presentation)

We’ve seen it all. We’re numb to it. Your ad is just white noise in the symphony of commercial desperation.

The Solution: Don’t Look Like an Ad, Dummy

Here’s the twist ending you didn’t see coming (or maybe you did, because I’m writing this and not very subtle): the only advertising that works doesn’t look like advertising at all.

The businesses that succeed in Florida—or anywhere, really—are the ones that understand a fundamental truth: people don’t want to be sold to, but they’re desperate to be educated and entertained.

Education as Marketing

Instead of a billboard screaming “BEST PLUMBER IN FLORIDA,” create content that actually helps people:

• A video series on “5 Things That Are Probably Wrong With Your Florida Home’s Plumbing Right Now”
• A blog post about “Why Your Water Smells Like Eggs and What It Means”
• A TikTok showing the horrifying things you found in someone’s pipes this week

This is content people actually WANT to consume. They’ll share it. They’ll remember your name. And when their toilet explodes at 2 AM, guess who they’re calling? Not the guy from the billboard they ignored. They’re calling you, the plumber who taught them why their water pressure sucks.

Entertainment as Marketing

The brands crushing it right now are the ones that understand entertainment value. Look at Liquid Death—they sell water, possibly the most boring product on Earth, but their marketing is so entertaining that people seek it out.

Florida businesses could learn from this. Instead of a boring restaurant ad, create a soap opera about the drama in your kitchen. Instead of a straightforward law firm commercial, make a mockumentary about the worst cases you’ve definitely never taken (wink wink). Instead of a dental practice flyer, create a horror comedy about what happens when people ignore their teeth.

People will watch this. They’ll share it. They’ll talk about it. And they’ll remember you when they need your service.

The Authenticity Play

The other thing that works is genuine authenticity—which is different from the performative “authenticity” that’s just another marketing tactic. People can smell fake from a mile away.

Show the real people behind your business. Tell actual stories. Be honest about your prices, your services, your limitations. The contractors that show their faces, walk clients through projects, and explain costs transparently? They’re booked solid. The ones running generic ads about “quality work” and “competitive prices”? They’re praying for leads.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Here’s what this all means: most traditional advertising in Florida (and everywhere else, but especially Florida) is just expensive theater. It’s businesses going through the motions because “that’s what you’re supposed to do” and advertising agencies are happy to take the money while delivering “metrics” and “impressions” that don’t translate to actual revenue.

A $50,000 billboard campaign sounds impressive at the board meeting. It feels like you’re doing something big and professional. But if you took that same money and invested it in creating genuinely valuable, entertaining, or educational content, you’d probably get a better return.

The problem is that real marketing—the kind that doesn’t look like advertising—is harder. It requires creativity, consistency, and actually understanding your audience as humans rather than “targets” or “demographics.” It means becoming a content creator, an educator, an entertainer. It means the CEO might need to get on TikTok or write blog posts or actually engage with the community.

That’s scary. That’s vulnerable. It’s much easier to write a check for a billboard and call it marketing.

But here we are in 2025, where the most successful businesses are the ones that stopped advertising and started connecting. Where the personal injury attorney who makes educational videos about Florida insurance laws gets more clients than the one with twenty billboards. Where the restaurant that posts behind-the-scenes content gets more reservations than the one running TV commercials.

The Conclusion You Saw Coming

Advertising in Florida isn’t worthless because Florida is special or unique or particularly difficult. It’s worthless because advertising as we’ve traditionally defined it—interrupting people to shout about your business—has become fundamentally incompatible with how humans consume information in the modern age.

Your billboard on I-95 is worthless. Your TV commercial is muted. Your Google Ad is accidentally clicked. Your direct mail is recycled unread. Your email is in spam.

And your competitors are experiencing the exact same thing, which is why everyone keeps doing it—misery loves company, and marketing budgets love tradition.

The businesses that win are the ones brave enough to stop advertising and start contributing. To stop selling and start serving. To stop interrupting and start engaging.

Or you could just buy another billboard. I hear there’s a great spot on I-95 between the Morgan & Morgan sign and the other Morgan & Morgan sign.

Your choice, Florida.