Ad-Blocking Genie Will Not Return to the Bottle

Adobe and Pagefair, warning that ad-blocking software will rob the advertising and media industries of billions in revenue, have launched a lobbying effort to stop the global spread of such software, according to the New York Times, BusinessInsider and others.

The lobbying effort may be too little, too late.

First, according to the study commissioned by Adobe and Pagefair to show the scope of the problem, some 200 million people around the world already use ad-blockers to avoid seeing any ads on their desktops. Second, Adobe is warning, in essence, that this may only be the beginning of adland's misery. Since Apple's new iOS releases open the iPhone to ad-blocking apps from independent developers, Adobe reports today in its own publication, CMO, billions more in revenue will disappear and the nascent but fast-growing mobile ad business may be virtually stomped out.

More important, however, are the facts that history teaches us: The tide of change—including the viral adoption of ad-blockers—is inexorably and irreversibly sweeping toward more and more audience-control over what is seen and heard and less and less advertiser- and publisher-control over media. So no matter what the ad industry wants, the ad-blocking genie will not be going back in the bottle.

This all raises the central question: Why are hundreds of millions of people so annoyed with ads and so distrustful of advertising that they have gone to the trouble of downloading and installing software to block it all? And if blocking the ad-blockers won't work, is there a viable strategy to get people to pay attention to commercial messages?

If the ad industry confronts this question squarely, there is only one reasonable answer—the solution to ad-blocking and ad-avoidance of all kinds is to change advertising (a move which is entirely under the industry's control), instead of trying to block ad-blocking (a move that will never work).

When all ads are narratives that are relevant, engaging, informative and entertaining, that add value to the audience's lives, then there will be no ad-blocking. Instead, there will be more ad-embracing. (And there is considerable data to support the notion that ads in the form of valuable stories are welcomed and produce outsized results.)

Adobe and Pagefair would be more effective if they lobbied to radically change advertising instead of tilting at the windmill of trying to force people (as if this were the 1960s) to pay attention to ads they do not want to see.