If the ad industry wants to make any headway in its war against ad blocking, it needs to up its game.
Specifically: no more distracting consumers, disrupting them, or trying to cram a message they don’t want to receive down their throats.
That was the message Interactive Advertising Bureau president and CEO Randall Rothenberg delivered to the crowd at the Cannes International Festival of Creativity on Monday. Rothenberg was hosting a panel discussion called “Why World Class Creative Will Obliterate Ad Blocking.”
Today’s consumers are more in control of their media intake than ever before, and as they increasingly have the power to choose which ads they see, Rothenberg said marketers must ensure their messages provide utility. If they fail to, consumers will simply block them out.
“The next generation of advertising must entertain and it must inform,” he said. “The next generation of advertising must make people feel that blocking advertising is blocking a valuable part of their daily experience.”
The New York Times Company president and CEO Mark Thompson echoed Rothenberg’s sentiment. Speaking bluntly, Thompson told the audience the “root cause of digital ad blocking is digital ads.” Too many digital ads, he said, are intrusive, distracting and slow to load.
“The technical term for this is a completely shitty experience of consumers,” Thompson said.
While The New York Times has taken significant steps to reimagine the way it serves ads, including coming up with new ad units, that’s just one of the myriad ways the publisher is dealing with the problem ad blockers pose.
For starters, The Times did a major reader survey on the topic of ad blocking this spring, soliciting responses from 200,000 digital subscribers and 500,000 non-subscribers – each of whom used ad blockers. Though he did not suggest it was a result of the survey, Thompson said The Times is currently developing an ad-free subscription — an option he said will be “quite expensive.”
In March, the publisher also started serving users it detected were using ad blockers with a message asking them to either subscribe or “whitelist” the site (meaning to add it as an exception to their ad blocker).
“The best things in life aren’t free,” the message read. “You currently have an ad blocker installed. Advertising helps fund our journalism. To continue to enjoy The Times, please support us.”
According to Thompson, 40% of non-subscribers agreed to whitelist the site when served with the message.
If publisher want to thwart ad blockers, Thompson said, these kind of appeals are key. “We must make sure our users understand the link between ad revenue and high quality content. If we’re not clear about that, we shouldn’t blame consumers if they don’t understand.”
Another panelist, R/GA vice-president of content Jess Greenwood, however, was less optimistic about the strategy of appealing to consumers’ appreciation for ad-funded journalism.
“Given the right choice and the free thing, consumers will always do the free thing. That’s the logic of the market,” Greenwood said. “Begging people to turn their ad blockers off… that strategy is running out of road.”
