I’m only 29, but the impression I have received from my youth, from parental and grandparental anecdotes, and from photographic records is that offline advertising in at least Melbourne, Australia is worse than it was, with a key tipping period being somewhere around 15 years ago. As the most significant example, public transport vehicles and locations had no-to-minimal advertising 20 years ago; now they have extensive advertising surfaces, inside and out, and the big posters at most of the train stations cycle between multiple ads and blah blah blah. Awful stuff.

My guess is that offline advertising has become cheaper and so they do more of it.

I live out in the country now. There are no outdoor ads here. I like it.

(The local weekly paper is called The Advertiser: an apt name, for it’s about ¾ ads. But I don’t look at it. My life is basically completely ad-free except when I go down to Melbourne.)

It's funny but i actually like the ads on the trains in Japan and when I was visiting other countries who's transit systems had no ads I thought it was boring.

Some of the ads are hilarious. Some are for the services that are not common in the USA. Nintendo has some where they add in a trivia Q&A, the format being, Question->Ad->Answer and I usually find them interesting and I'm often happy to learn about whatever new Nintendo game they are showing off. Often there are ads for theater plays, concerts, museum events that I only find out about because I saw them on the train.

I also like some of the campaigns where they decorate an entire station or the entire train, the entire car.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the pervasiveness of online advertising creeping in at the fringes of our attention normalized an increase in the amount of ads that do this in the physical world.