No winners in this mostly calm advertising argument

Today’s question: Please help us settle a supper table debate in our family. What is the most heavily advertised product in the United States? My husband says it is pharmaceuticals. I say it’s cars and trucks. Our 13-year-old daughter says it is fast food. Who is right?

I’m glad this sounds like a fairly peaceable discussion. Some of the family debate questions I get sound like the two sides are on the verge of doing bodily harm over something like soup spoons.

I can sort of answer this, but the stuff I found seems to vary a bit and ranks the stuff not by product categories but by individual companies. Plus, most of it is a couple years old.

I don’t know about you, but the more a company advertises, the less I trust it. During elections years, the more glossy campaign ads I find in my mailbox, the less likely I am to vote for whoever sent them. Maybe that’s just me. OK, back to the subject at hand. I found a top 10 list of companies that spent the most on advertising as of a couple of years ago at stat ista.com, which as far as I know is a reputable site.

According to that list, AT&T spent the most on advertising in the United States at about $1.146 billion in 2015.

Geico was second at $1.106 billion and Verizon was third at $1.03 billion.

The others, in descending order, were McDonalds, Ford, Chevrolet, T-Mobile, Sprint, Nissan and Macy’s.

I assume those costs include not just buying air time or print space, but also the costs of producing all those ads.