Attack the block

On the information superhighway, advertising has often become a road-block, rather than a roadside billboard to be admired or ignored as we see fit, writes IMGROUP’s Steve Sydee.

It’s been a long day at work. You sit down to watch the latest Force Awakens trailer on YouTube. You click the link. Showtime!

A small hitch. You have to sit through a 20 second advert for Mr Kipling’s Cherry Bakewells before the trailer starts.

“Forget about that product that will change my life forever,” you scream, “just get to the flippin’ Star Destroyer!”

Block party

Ad blocking has been very popular on Windows devices for ages, but in the Apple-loving world, this has gone largely unnoticed. On mobile in particular, ad blocking is comparatively low so far (DigitasLBi’s Andrew Girdwood puts the figure as low as 2%) – probably because of the dominance of iPhones.

But it is becoming more popular all the time, so advertisers and publishers are starting to sweat over its impact on their revenue streams. Worse still, Apple’s latest operating system finally allows ad-blocking extensions to be added to Safari. The term “ad-block-alypse” is already doing the rounds.

Why the doomsday rhetoric? Didn’t they know it existed before? Well, advertisers have been estimated to spend some $64.25 billion worldwide on mobile in 2015. And Mobile Safari, according to a recent study by Pagefair, represents 52% of the mobile browsing market. (Only a day after the launch of iOS 9, ad blocking app downloads were topping the App Store charts.) Why is this?

Commercial brakes

Online advertising can at times test even the most Zen-like viewer. The worst pop-up noisy and unbidden, the means to close them cunningly concealed. Is this really how to obtain brand loyalty? And why aren’t they relevant to what you’re looking at? The tendency of web adverts towards inappropriate placement is notorious.

[advert position=”left”]

It’s on phones in particular that this often clumsy advertising can irritate. As Gabriel Arana of Huffington Post writes: “on mobile devices…an ad may not only take up 75 per cent of your screen but also exhaust your battery and your data plan.”

On the information superhighway, advertising has often become a road-block, rather than a roadside billboard to be admired or ignored as we see fit.

Give us a break!

This isn’t the way the advertisers sees things, arguing that far from being the enemies of the internet, they are the reason it can continue to exist – almost every website depends upon advertising revenue.

Many, therefore, probably view companies like Eyeo (the creators of Adblock Plus, the world’s most popular ad-blocking software), with a similar degree of righteous disdain to that of the CEO of IAB, Randall Rothberg, when earlier this year he wrote: “Ad blocking is robbery, plain and simple – an extortionist scheme.”

Block busters

Some publishers are beginning to fight back – attempting to blocks the blockers. Recently, for example, City A.M. became the first UK newspaper to “ban” readers who use ad blockers. Others adopt a subscription-based model, placing content behind paywalls. Both strategies risk alienating audiences as it is easy to find free-to-browse similar content.

That might all change soon. And given that – as Ad Age reported this year – the New York Times only receives 10% of digital ad revenue through mobile advertising, despite 50% of its web traffic coming through mobile, abandoning mobile ads might not spell the end for the biggest publishers.

Still, this isn’t great news for smaller publishers or advertisers and brands – what can they do to survive?

Some argue that it is all a matter of educating the public, and that given the choice between tolerating adverts or paying for websites, most would opt for the adverts. However, that still leaves adverts tolerated rather than engaged with.

A creative block?

Limitation can act as a powerful spur to creativity. Advertisers might not like ad blocking, but they have to acknowledge that its growing popularity is partly based on intrusive advertising tactics and saturation-level web-coverage.

Scott Cunningham, senior vice president of technology and ad operations at the IAB, recently admitted that the online advertising industry had “messed up”. Cunningham wrote that, “tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of user experience.”

Take the excessive volume of adverts: a study from last year found that while the average person is exposed to over 5,000 advertisements daily, the number of ads that make an impression -garnering engagement – is just twelve. So while audiences are being steadily battered into a state of indifference, how much money is really being made from internet advertising for clients?

Naomi Hands, strategic partnerships manager at Somo, sees an upside to ad blocking: “Advertisers may actually waste fewer ads as disinterested parties opt out.”

The rise in ad blocking, however, suggests those “disinterested parties” are hardly a minority. The focus to combat consumer disinterest, then, can only really be to make adverts interesting and relevant.

Block to the future

One way to make adverts more interesting is to dump the really bad adverts, helping combat the prejudice many web users have which puts them off bothering with any adverts.

Certainly, advertisers are now getting the message. IAB Tech Lab has launched the L.E.A.N. Ads program. The acronym stands for the type of adverts IAB are officially in favour of: Light, Encrypted, Ad-Choice Supported, and Non-Invasive.

Scott Cunningham writes: “The consumer is demanding these actions, challenging us to do better, and we must respond.”

How else can advertisers “do better”? For starters, relevant targeting should be an absolute priority for both advertisers and publishers. As Alex Kuhnel wrote earlier this month: “Even the cleverest, wittiest, most compelling content is wasted if it is being seen by the wrong audience, or in an inappropriate context.”

Whatever form targeting takes, it will always be fundamentally dependent upon (as Alex Kuhnel writes) “high-quality, trusted data which both the buy and sell-side of the industry can exploit and use as a common currency”.

Advertisers need the best tools to collect and manage data; otherwise, they risk – at best – wasting impressions and – at worst – alienating consumers.

Steve Sydee is business development executive at IMGROUP.