Ad-blocking is on the rise, and is a growing concern amongst marketers. There has been an outcry about its potential impact but before any argument about the exchange between brands and consumers, we need to understand why it’s happening. As so often the case in digital, it comes down to customer experience.
Last week saw another report explaining how customers feel let down by brands – this time in terms of customer experience and response. We’ve all been there when unable to reach someone for help, with no response that fits your needs and no easy way to address the problem. The more ubiquitous the digital underpinnings of our daily lives become, the more we expect immediacy and efficiency in our communications with both public and private sector.
We’re constantly told that what matters in digital is the customer experience, that brands must deliver on personalisation. Yet when, as a consumer, we can’t download a page because of the weight of advertising, we’re not going to have an internal debate about how ad-blocking is going to affect the advertising and marketing worlds, we’re just going to turn on an ad-blocker. Whether or not the industry debates the need for ‘better ads’ that isn’t going to change. While the “Coalition For Better Ads,” was endorsed by the World Federation of Advertisers at Dmexco last week, is a worthy project – what difference is it actually likely to make?
Adblocking technology like that used by Adblock Plus has been blamed for harming online publishers, which rely on advertising revenue to pay for the content they create. According to a report by PageFair, adblockers cost publishers almost $22bn in 2015 alone. And the challenge has led to some interesting responses – as for example in Adblock Plus launching its ‘Acceptable Ads’ platform last week.
The company says that its Acceptable Ads Platform will allow publishers and bloggers to choose to sell and show only pre-whitelisted ads – those that meet Adblock Plus’s strict criteria – on their websites. Publishers will get to keep 80% of the advertising revenue from ads sold through the marketplace, and the rest will be divided between Adblock Plus and other partners.
Since 2011, the company has allowed certain nonintrusive ads to pass through the blocking software and appear as intended. These ads must meet strict criteria in terms of how they are placed and appear. They must not disrupt the user’s natural reading flow, they should always be recognizable as ads, and they shouldn’t be too big.
Of course it’s not simply that there are too many ads. The problem may actually be the disconnect between the brand displaying the advertising and the advertising itself. Few publishers, for example, have control of the placement of ads on their sites, where and when each appear, how many are allowed on page or even how disruptive that ad is allowed to be. The digital media landscape is full of independent networks and placement platforms – how exactly is that disconnect supposed to improve the customer experience?
It could well be the growth of programmatic that is to blame for much of the growing tension between advertiser and consumer. The current programmatic advertising slows down site loading (as pointed out by Eveo, the company behind Adblock Plus, at the launch of its platform.
As Craig Hendry, Product Management Lead at Switch Concepts points out, the challenge in programmatic is the increasing use of header bidding, which is implemented to create an auction platform that enables ad space to be sold to the highest bidder. The header bidding process places a special wrapper into the publisher’s web browser which then lives and executes in the client environment stuffing in as many third party scripts as possible. This puts increasing pressure on client-side servers, which has the unfortunate effect of slowing down the loading of web pages, through ‘latency’, and consequently damages the user experience. By blocking the ads, the latency disappears, reducing the time it takes for pages to load, freeing consumers from the annoyance and frustration of having to wait for ads to appear before they can enjoy the content on their website of choice.
So it seems to come down to one thing. Brands need to regain control of their ad space and honour the unspoken agreement that they would be non-invasive and not annoy their audience. Adblocking isn’t going away and until publishers sit up and take responsibility for their relationship with their audiences, the trend is only going to continue.
