OMG! What if ad personalisation is the problem?

The problem for advertisers trying to personalise their messages is that they think they know the ‘you’ they’re chasing, says Dominic Mills – but the more they chase the real ‘you’, the more they risk getting it wrong.

Here’s a contrarian thought. It has long been part of the Holy Grail that the more personalised the advertising experience – defining personalisation as relevance, behaviour-linked and context as well as an understanding of ‘me’ – the more consumers like it.

What if that’s wrong? And the more personalised it gets, the creepier we find it, and the more we dislike it.

Is this, therefore, one of the motivating forces behind the rise of ad blocking?

And is there a danger that, as advertisers chase this solution in the mistaken belief that it is what people want, they are actually turning them off? Certainly, according to some new research from GfK, presented by Colin Strong at an AdWeek session last week – you can watch the video here or read more about it here – it’s an issue.

Far from being an unambiguous plus, Strong says, there is a point at which personalisation tips the scale and turns negative, as the chart below, based on interviews with 1,000 consumers, shows.

Using a parallel from the real world, I know what he means: I once ‘interviewed’ someone for a job over lunch, making it a semi-social occasion. They had done their research into me, especially stuff I’d written. “Now you obviously like this blah blah,” they’d say, citing a column. “You really disapprove of this blah blah,” they’d continue.

This is, in human terms, the equivalent of accessing my digital data to figure out my likes, dislikes and interests.

It really hacked me off. I might have thought these things once (although like most columnists, I can barely remember last week’s, let alone further back), but I didn’t anymore. It wasn’t necessarily untrue, but it was frozen in time, and it was their view of ‘me’, as opposed to my view of ‘me’. It was personalisation too far, and the thought of someone skulking through my archive was creepy; lunch was as short as I could decently make it.

And this of course is the problem for advertisers trying to personalise their messages. They think they know the ‘you’ they’re chasing, and sometimes – and in certain contexts – they do. But the more they chase the real ‘you’, the more they risk getting it wrong, or looking like a stalker.

As Strong noted, it’s hard to know the extent to which personalisation is the issue. Even if it is a significant factor, it’s surely not the only one.

But when, as he showed, 39% of people say they have taken steps to block ads, and 30% would if it was easy, we’re dealing with a problem the scale of which threatens the digital economy.

Of course, the amount of adblocking varies enormously, both by site and country. The Guardian admits to 13% globally of desktop users, and 25% in Germany. According to a PageFair report from 2013, the average blocking rate is 22.7% across multiple countries, rising at 43% a year.

Like all averages of course, it conceals as much as it reveals, and some sites suffer from blocking rates of 65% plus.

In fact, according to Mutual Media’s Adam Freeman, the problem may be even larger, since some ad servers may actually record blocked ads as seen, so some consumer adblocking is in effect passing under the radar.

Video may be a bigger issue, since the interruption factor is greater. I quite admire the way ITV is seeking to block the adblockers from its VoD player, even though, as this Facebook thread shows, there’s some hardcore ad-objectors trying to find a way round it.

What we don’t know is how much this is hurting the core ITV model, or what success it is having persuading viewers to pay for its ad-free VoD offering and, therefore, whether other ad-supported publishers could copy it.

So if personalisation might be the problem rather than the solution, what are the alternatives? Amnet COO Sacha Bunatyan, who runs Aegis’s trading desk, thinks one reason might be low levels of creativity – which is a polite way of saying the ads are crap. As she points out, the creative agencies are currently some way removed both from the media process and this debate.

They should be involved in the debate, but even if the ads do get better, the best the industry can hope for is that it slows down the rate of blocking, rather than reversing it.

Frequency is undoubtedly a problem too, believes Xaxis’s director of audience and data, Tim Abraham. It’s hard to disagree when you constantly see the same ad or advertiser.

But hold on a minute. Er, isn’t it programmatic buying that’s causing the frequency problem? If Xaxis’s magic black box is as clever as they tell us (and all the other trading desks too), why can’t they optimise frequency such that it isn’t a factor in consumer adblocking?

Perhaps the real truth is that the black boxes aren’t as clever as they’d have us believe; or maybe that it doesn’t suit their trading model to reveal to their clients the negative impact of frequency.

So what are the alternatives? You could pay people to see ads, as preference-based services like Qustodian do for mobile, although some think this is a gateway for click-fraud.

In a sense, Qustodian is part of what you might call the personal data economy, since the real value exchange is based on the consumer willingly giving up their data in return for a better advertising experience and a micro-payment. I’m sure we’ll see the personal data economy having an influence on this issue.

Or advertisers could step up their use of native advertising which, for the most part, is not ad served but comes through the publisher’s content management system, and thus is beyond the reach of standard adblocking tools.

On the plus side, native advertising lends itself to higher levels of creativity; on the downside, it’s expensive and doesn’t suit every advertiser or every advertising occasion.

Then there are what you might call hybrid systems like Mutual Media’s AdPlus, which allow users to block stuff they don’t like, as well as indicate their preferences. As founder Adam Freeman says, “it puts the consumer in control, and lets them choose the ads they want to see, as opposed to letting the ad industry make the decisions.”

It’s a complicated old world, however, and when you consider that mobile adblocking is, compared to desktop blocking, in its infancy, a scary one too.

The truth is that no-one really knows the answers yet, and as long as the industry continues to stick its head in the sand, there’s not enough debate either.

One thing is certain, though: no one part of the industry – advertisers, agencies or publishers – can solve the problem on its own. Somewhere, somehow, it has to come together.

Talking about it would be a start