Rubicon Project is launching a browser plug-in that will let users tailor what ads they see online as the company battles against growing consumer distrust of advertising.
Also addressing the problem of adblocking and annoying ad experiences, Rubicon said it wants to “change advertising for good.”
“Our vision is to turn advertising into information and provide information as a service to consumers,” said Frank Addante, CEO and Founder of Rubicon Project.
“We founded Rubicon Project with the mission of fuelling the growth of the Internet by making advertising an effortless source of capital for innovators and content creators. There have always been three participants involved in advertising and for too long our industry has focused on the buyers and sellers and ignored consumers and their experience.”
Addante said the increasing adoption of ad blockers, privacy concerns and general apathy for ads, are symptoms of this lack of focus on the consumer experience.
“People recently have been given a choice with ad blockers, but their choice has been limited to either see all ads or block all ads,” he said. “That’s not ideal for consumers, advertisers or publishers and application developers.”
Rubicon is now offering a new option: the ability to choose the specific ads and interests that people want to see or don’t want to see.
Utilising the company’s machine learning technology, the idea is to put people in control of their data, privacy and interests.
Dubbed, in a rather self-congratulatory manner, ‘Project Awesome‘, it will “continually adapt and hone” an individual user’s advertising experience based upon real-time feedback, personal interest profiles, and liked and disliked ad categories and creatives.
Users will be able to “snooze” or block specific ads, build a profile so more relevant ads can be seen and save ads for another time. There is also the ability to search for specific categories to tailor future ads. Rubicon says that the user owns the data, and nothing will be sold.
Adblocking has been on the rise across the globe. In the UK Mediatel’s Connected Screens survey reveals that 40% of us have installed an adblocker, while the IAB has a more conservative estimate of around 20%.
In a separate study conducted by Adobe, 78% of consumers said that they liked personalised ads, but only 28% thought ads targeted to them were tailored correctly.
