Ad blocking: so what do we do now?

iabuk.net

Ad blocking is a wake up call for the digital industry, argues Dale Lovell, Chief Digital Officer at Adyoulike and member of the IAB’s Content and Native Council, but the tools we need to innovate a solution are already at our disposal.

Ad blocking is big news in 2016. It’s yet another wake up call to the industry. But most of us already recognised there was a problem with digital ad formats. Hence the rise in native advertising and content marketing in recent years. Consumers want better ads. But that’s not to say the industry hasn’t yearned for them for years too.

The challenge for advertisers is to take away the desire for consumers to want to use ad blockers. How to do that exactly?

We need to think about the value exchange.

Digital advertising is increasingly built on the value exchange. Consumer time is precious. There are a lot of competing distractions. In exchange for their time interacting with your brand, digital consumers expect something in return. They expect a brand to entertain them. Or to offer them information they need or find interesting. That’s the value exchange.

How do we add value?

It means be less intrusive, for a start. Embrace formats that are less like that and think about how to give your customers what they want. Be less annoying. Tell stories. Share stories. Invest time and resource in stories. Build a compelling brand content strategy. Then build a compelling distribution model for delivering these stories to your target audience.

What else should we do?

We need to create better digital advertising, designed specifically for digital (stop shoe-horning TV ads into mobile video units, for example). Use the technology at our fingertips to create, not just track performance and generate reams of data for the sake of data.

We should look at ad-blocking as an opportunity to create something better: an opportunity to take digital advertising to the next level using the technology and tools that are already at our disposal. Innovate - this is what leading brands and their pioneering agencies do so well. And it’s what the digital ad industry has always done.

Programmatic buying and the arrival of in-feed programmatic native advertising inventory means that the right content delivered at the right time to the right person in a space where they will actually interact with it is now easily achievable.

Look to create wherever possible immersive ad experiences that look beyond narrow KPIs based on clicks, views or dwell times.

The recent Coke Zero ad campaign does just that and is a great example of the immersive future of all advertising. This video explains it far better than I can:

The reality is that most people who interacted with these ads forgot it was even an ad: they were bought in to the experience; they didn’t even realize a value exchange was taking place. They were immersed completely in the story created by the brand. They weren’t reaching for the ad-blocker.

This is the future of all advertising – offline and on – but it is only possible when underpinned by great technology and the innovation of digital creatives and exciting new ad formats. This is the real value of digital advertising. It’s our job as an ad industry to showcase it.