Ad Blocking is Killing Advertising! Influencer Marketing is Better Anyway.

Advertising and marketing are fluid industries. Things that were hot, turn cold. And the things that were cold, turn hot. Throughout the internet era, we’ve seen things that were loved than hated and loved again come and go. We’ve seen the browsers institute pop-up blockers that forced a whole (unloved) segment of web advertising shift to other ways to get people to notice the messages (and not just the shift to pop-under ads, which did work for a bit).

The current hot-button issue right now is ad-blocking. It’s about to go from the tech savvy (and most Millennials) to mass adoption, as Apple’s plan for the future of browsing will be “a range of blocking tools aimed at removing or filtering ads and improving privacy,” as noted by Jean-Louis Gassée in his recent Monday Note.

Couple that with all the major browsers blocking Adobe Flash and a recent study saying that worldwide, close to 200 million people are using ad-blocking software… well, there’s going to need to be a shift in the thinking of advertisers and marketers. So, if the traditional online ad is doomed, what will remain? Creativity?—?creativity that will be seen with an increase in influencer marketing.

As many studies and reports have noted, audiences today have become numb to traditional advertising. Even without ad blocking, ads might be served but are they actually doing anything? There are calls to be better, more-creative, and smarter but the reality is that the advertising industry needs to evolve with the audiences.

“Advertising has always been about creatively grabbing attention, but the current digital landscape requires the combination of creativity and authority,” notes Dani Klein, Social Strategy Lead at MediaCom. “Innately, consumers don’t trust most brands. Social influencers allow brands to tap a trusted authority and directly target their followers through their authentic and relevant content.”

Taking your “ads” to the people must move beyond simple creative components and programmatic black box buys. The readers know the difference and with the new ad blocking technologies they won’t see your old model anyways.

The average reader wants to get recommendations from friends, relatives and people that they trust. There’s a reason that the largest growing segment in marketing and advertising is social media, the user generated content that resonates with the consumer.

And a big part of that is influencer marketing. As a society, we look to the trusted and valued authority and that has extended to our celebrity culture. Influencer marketing is the brand’s strongest entry into corporation’s target markets.

Plus, we all know that the most successful campaigns?—?marketing, social media, advertising?—?start by defining a target audience, finding out where they are and what content they are consuming before messaging to them. And then finding their audiences and influencers to deliver the messages?—?in a real, organic way.

In fact, Rob Norman, the Chief Digital Officer at GroupM talks about redefining ads in an era of ad blocker in a recent Linkedin Pulse post. “Part of the solution could surely be to improve the quality of advertising experience on the web through more refined targeting, better quality creative, native formats and sensible frequency capping.”

“Companies need to connect with consumers” notes Hooman Radfar, partner at Expa and Chairman of AddThis. “That drives advertising and marketing?—?whether it’s video, photo or content. People want to find out about the best and newest products from the people that matter most to them. That’s why influencer marketing has an opportunity to disrupt the advertising model. Unlike content delivered via traditional display advertising, influencer delivered content has a shot at changing behavior.”

So how does influencer marketing fit into this new world? The past four years have been a buildup to this moment. From the onset, we looked at the way “influence” was being bought and sold across social and how brands and agencies were playing the game?—?and we were really turned off. We knew it wasn’t about the numbers alone, but that the true value of what “influence” was in context: why you do what you do online, why people choose to follow you and how content moves around the web.

These questions, among many more, are why we originally built the loop88 influencer platform. Our goal was to figure out why a given brand or piece of content would be the perfect match with a given influencer?—?and not just the influencer, but their audiences. Today, we articulate that experience on Pinterest and do so successfully with our many brand clients, agencies and partners.

The next quarter may see an upheaval in the advertising space, in publishing models and in the way everyone experiences the web from here on.