{"id":117140,"date":"2016-01-28T19:20:00","date_gmt":"2016-01-29T00:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/ad-blocking-scare-will-make-us-better\/"},"modified":"2024-12-19T16:40:25","modified_gmt":"2024-12-19T21:40:25","slug":"ad-blocking-scare-will-make-us-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/en-ca\/insights\/blog\/paid-media\/ad-blocking-scare-will-make-us-better\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the Ad Blocking Scare Will Make Us Better"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s hard to avoid the chatter around the concept of ad blocking if you work in the digital marketing<\/a> industry these days. Since Apple released iOS 9 last fall and started approving ad blocking apps, the news has been full of the impending crisis that ad blocking will cause. While ad blocking is a serious issue that can’t (and shouldn’t) be ignored by those of us in the ad industry, the result of it won’t be the death of online advertising. Quite the opposite will ultimately happen, in fact. Ad blocking will make online advertising (and with it the whole of the Internet) better for everyone.<\/p>\n

First, let’s remember that ad blocking is not new. Ad blocking software has been available and in relatively wide use in desktop browsers for years. In fact, you could argue that popup blockers were the first ad blocking technology deployed way back in the early online days. Those annoying early Internet popup ads are actually a very instructive parallel for what we’re experiencing today and how we can overcome it. Ad blocking is today, just as it was then, an allergic reaction to bad online advertising. The motivation\u00a0to go out of your way to install something that shields you from marketing messages\u00a0requires a pretty strong stimulus, and so much of the stuff that’s out there in\u00a0this industry right now, sadly, fits the bill.<\/p>\n

So what does bad advertising look like? I think we all have a pretty good idea of that, as we’ve all no doubt been exposed to it. Bad advertising is intrusive. It’s deceptive. It’s overly interruptive to our online activities. The quintessential example of this is the click-bait site, and the Internet today is overrun with them. While there are a lot of factors that have contributed to the rise of properties like this, I have to look first at the marketing community. Programmatic display advertising technology has intoxicated us with targeting possibilities and blinded us with the promise of cheap impressions. The intention here has been mostly good. Agencies want to deliver value to their clients by reducing cost and eliminating waste. Client-side marketers want to merchandise value and demonstrate wins and efficiencies. What we’ve all lost sight of is that the experience of how that advertising is delivered is really, really important, and we are feeling the effects of that as our audiences flock to these technologies to block us. And make no mistake about it; they are blocking us. That should sting, and our posture as an industry right now should\u00a0be that of someone who has just been publicly chastised. We have to take responsibility for this and do better. Let’s take a look at how we can do that.<\/p>\n

First of all, as marketers, we have to demand more of our networks. The race to the bottom in terms of impressions and clicks in online display has degraded the quality of those commodities tremendously. As usual, when something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Just look at some of the reports of how these programmatic campaigns are performing by traditional branding measures. As the people planning and executing these media buys, we have to understand and act on the fact that all impressions are not equal. I\u00a0am consistently\u00a0seeing ads for big brands on these low-quality click-bait sites (never mind why I’m on click-bait sites; it’s not important). Those impressions get stacked into false page views in intentionally clunky slideshows designed to get you to inadvertently click on that retargeting ad you just saw for the 12th time this session. This is bad advertising. It deserves an ad blocker, and we can do better. Be legalistic about things like frequency capping. Weed out bad\u00a0sites through exclusion. Report them to the networks, and starve them of impressions. They will either go away or improve their practices. Not only is this the right thing to do for the users, it is clearly the right thing to do for brands. Appearing in this fashion is waste. It’s ineffective. It does not matter how low you can get your CPM when what you’re buying is absolute garbage. If we strive to make advertising targeted, relevant and meaningful, those efforts will have the dual benefit of improving client results and the user experience.<\/p>\n

I put what marketers need to do first for a reason. It’s the most important piece of the puzzle here, but it’s not the only one. Publishers and ad networks have a big role in this as well. Accepting ad dollars from sites that exist only to monetize display impressions is, to put it mildly, problematic. Propping up those business models by continually allowing non-paid traffic from major web properties\u00a0is also contributing to the environment that has users blocking ads. Google has been a leader in this area. First of all, they have very strict quality guidelines for advertisers. The prohibited practice policy section for AdWords<\/a> clearly states that “ads promoting sites or apps that offer little unique value to users and are focused primarily on traffic generation” are not welcome. If all networks and publishers would simply enact and adhere to that policy, the need for ad blockers would materially diminish. Beyond that, Google has put a monumental amount of effort behind weeding out this kind of junk in their organic search results<\/a>. The series of Panda updates<\/a> over the past five years have been targeted at sites with thin content that exists largely to aggregate and monetize traffic. I don’t mean to pick on a single site, but let’s take Answers.com<\/a> as an example. Just take a look at this traffic graph from Hitwise:<\/p>\n

\"Answers<\/a><\/p>\n

\n \n
\n
\n

\n Stay Forward <\/h2>\n

\n Get exclusive insights into digital
media's top-trending topics delivered
directly to your inbox. <\/p>\n <\/div>\n\n

\n
\n
\n
\n \n