How ad blockers might save advertising from itself
Back in 2011, activist group PublicAdCampaign claimed to find “an exasperated public who would like to see less or no advertising at all.” Pipe dream though it may have once been, this is now a reality.
Digital ad spend is set to outstrip TV by 2018. That’s the latest forecast from ZenithOptimedia, which released its quarterly ad spend report this week.
It comes at a time of relentless debate about the declining role of art and creativity in advertising. Only a week before, Campaign – in new language, but along a familiar path – wondered if this trend would forge a dystopian landscape for advertising in which creativity is crushed under technology’s dogged march; if efficiency will become a poor substitute for effectiveness.
But these concerns pale in comparison to the threat posed by the advent – and increasing employment – of ad blockers. Last year, their use rocketed by 48 per cent in the US while, in Britain, some 12 million people are thought to be using them.
Digital ads pay for most of what we see online. In 2014, the world’s advertisers spent $13.5bn trying to steal a slice of our digital attention span. Google might look for all the world like a search engine, Facebook a social network, Twitter a place for sharing opinions explained Ed Conway in The Times. “In reality, each of them is an enormous twinkling billboard.”
New lucrative formats have flourished, from programmatic spots which follow you around the web, reminding you about that jacket you once discounted for being too expensive, to proprietary platforms like the Mail Online’s genius Fashion Finder.
Their increasing impotence is not just bad news for advertisers or agencies, it is undermining the very foundation of the World Wide Web.
As such, this is by no means being taken lying down. Anti-ad-blocking products have risen from the chagrin of advertisers and have even returned larger publishers some of their competitive edge: in October, City AM became one of the first British websites to introduce the software.
But people blocking ads hints at a problem much bigger than the technology allowing them to do so. This consumer backlash is little more than the cardinal sign of a disease which has been spreading for years. To suppress it with more technology is to ignore a very powerful message that many of us have quietly understood for years: a lot of advertising is simply not very good. The industry can not trade on the value exchange any longer; advertising should not be spoken about as a concession for quality content.
What’s more, in a rather admirable coup, the most powerful companies in the world may soon no longer be publishers, nor security firms or technology giants. But the ad blocking companies themselves, who are now taking payments from the likes of Google, Amazon and Microsoft in exchange for the whitelisting of their sites.
Controversial sure, but this is no cash-for-influence scandal. Appearing on the whitelist are those companies that the adblocker deems to carry quality advertising that would be acceptable to users.
This changes everything. The likability of ad spots was once dismissed as a post hoc fallacy: a welcome by-product but ultimately unrelated to effectiveness. But this can no longer be about creating ads that are merely tolerable, it must be about creating ads that their audience will seek out, enjoy and be inspired by.
The saviour of advertising may, in a delicious twist of irony, be the very companies designed to block it. And, quite the contrary to Campaign’s doom-mongering, creativity has never had a stronger hand to play.