Advertisers are letting their personal biases guide their targeting methods, causing them to overlook 44% of Americans who feel ignored by ads, according to the second annual New American Consumer Study from iHeartMedia and Malcolm Gladwell’s Pushkin Industries.

The companies polled 237 marketers and agency contacts from Advertiser Perceptions’  Ad Pros network and 1,651 U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 64 to find discrepancies in what both groups value. Consumer interviews were conducted online and data was weighted to a target sample reflective of the gender, age, race and regional make-up of the U.S., according to the last census. The results were shared on Tuesday with marketers at iHeartMedia’s AudioCon 2024 in New York.

The study showed that consumers and marketers tend to differ in where they live (the latter largely reside in coastal cities) and spending habits (advertisers will make purchases up to $1,000 on their own while consumers often consult friends and family members before spending $100). These differences cause incongruencies in what advertisers expect consumers to value and what they actually value, according to the study.

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For example, consumers reported interest in hunting, fishing and playing the lottery while exhorting religious values and defining luxury goods as brand-name paper towels and a quality slab of meat. Meanwhile, the more metropolitan marketer talked up tennis, pickleball, cold plunges and vegetarianism while placing less value on religion.

While this points to the marketing industry being out of touch with rural America, the 44% of Americans who reported feeling ignored by ads span geographies, races and ethnicities.

“This 44% ranges up and down in affluence a little bit and definitely ranges geographically and in terms of age and political leanings,” said Conal Byrne, CEO at iHeartMedia Digital Audio Group.

The issue lies in how advertisers let their biases guide data collection, which reaffirms their beliefs and informs targeting efforts that serve irrelevant ads, according to the study. Around 70% of consumer participants claimed digital ads are irrelevant despite targeting. About the same percentage said they hated being targeted by ads.

“We’ve got more data than we’ve ever had in the history of marketing, and yet there’s a lot of human bias that’s creeping into our marketing decisions,” said Gayle Troberman, chief marketing officer at iHeartMedia. “Part of it is probably because you can justify things with data more easily.”

Biases are also pushing advertisers to overinvest in platforms they think will resonate with consumers, Byrne said. Marketers over-index on music streaming, social media, and influencer marketing, which all put brands in front of the same audience, the study found.

“You’re really just playing with frequency,” he said. “You’re not playing with reach—you’re buying the same audience again and again and again because it’s the same audience on all of these platforms.”

He added that increasing frequency across platforms with similar audiences is fine if done purposefully, but speculated advertisers are unaware their media dollars are going towards the same goal.

More: How brands are battling digital media buying confusion

The decline of mass reach isn’t limited to marketing, said Gladwell, the journalist, author, host of the “Revisionist History” podcast and cofounder of podcast company Pushkin Industries, which partnered on the study. In his books, Gladwell has observed how media has become more esoteric as a whole.

“Television could … in the ’70s, bring about a kind of shift in the national consciousness,” he said in an interview. “It’s very hard to imagine that same thing happening today. There’s a profound difference in the way media operates.”

The study recommends marketers increase their spend on channels that reach oft-ignored consumers. iHeartMedia, naturally, recommends radio.

“We admitted out of the gate we come to this with our own bias which is audio,” said Byrne.

The study found that 72% of consumer respondents don’t want to buy products from brands that are ignoring them, while 75% would be willing to pay more to support a brand that shares their values. Investing in underutilized channels puts marketers in tune with what a broader range of consumers actually value, Byrne argues.

That kind of investment could help brands avoid catering to one side of the aisle, he added. 

Recently, companies including Molson Coors, Ford and Lowe’s cut DEI efforts to curb conservative backlash on social media.

“That 44% [of ignored consumers] are in Queens, New York and Orange County” too, Byrne said. “It’s not sequestered in a collection of Midwestern states or just the conservative voting base.”

iHeartMedia expects to run the study again next year, despite its hopes that advertisers invest more in its platform.

“An annual reminder for marketers to check our biases at the door and really start listening to our consumers more is a healthy reality check for us,” Troberman said. “Hopefully [the study] is a franchise we’ll keep doing in years three, four and five. Or maybe, better yet, we won’t need it.”