Adblocking: effect, cause, resolution?

I can't see you, so you can't see me.

Adblocking has alarmed both publishers and advertisers. For the former it means that total impressions served are not reflected in the amount of ad inventory available for sale. For the latter, the cost takes the form of lost potential reach rather than a direct financial penalty. There are many competing theories that purport to explain the rise of adblocking: latency of site performance, the cost of data for rendering ads, the clutter of sites, a resistance to ad tracking, irritation at being retargeted with a product already purchased and so on. Some or all of these are true some of the time.

There is also the broader ‘because I can’ theory. Simply, if the content is available without ads it’s a superior consumer experience. The ‘covert’ contract between user and publisher that called for the acceptance of advertising in exchange for content has been breached. 

The range of responses to the problem are as varied as its causes. Some publishers warn the user with an adblocker installed that, in addition to ads, content will also be blocked. In so doing they exercise their right not to undermine their revenue. 

Other publishers have engaged in aggressive site redesign to make for a better experience that includes ads. In doing that they are being more selective about the ads they run, the targeting engines that place them and the load / latency implications of both the ads themselves and the multiple tags they contain, themselves designed for verification, tracking and attribution. 

Advertisers and the entities that place their ads have always sought relevance and engagement; the consumer has chosen to set a higher bar.  Advertisers and the buyers of media have a further responsibility. Data has, to date, been seen as valuable almost without qualification. 

No advertiser, however, has either all the data to apply to all the inventory all the time or data that is always exclusive. This creates the phenomena of repetitive irrelevance; a user may buy from one source and then be continually exposed to the same ad from the sources from whom he did not buy. As multiple advertisers rely on the same data sets and apply those data sets via multiple performance-oriented distribution partners all seeking a reward for ‘making the sale’. This translates in his mind, as a peril of tracking that was intended by the advertiser to increase rather decrease relevance and value. This is a problem for the advertiser expressed in wasted impressions and the associated costs. 

This brief analysis suggests that a partial solution to adblocking is a combination of design, technology, common sense and the ability to establish the point, across channels and vendors, at which the application of a particular data point becomes the poison of marketing rather than the antidote to  ineffectiveness. 

Others have alternate solutions. The creation of ‘paid inclusion’ adblocker beaters seems insidious and tantamount to the use of the superhighway by superhighwaymen. The notion that approval of ads and advertisers by anyone other than the advertiser, publisher or consumer seems absurd. 

Reports of the penetration and usage of adblockers and its cost to the digital advertising economy vary widely and wildly. Initially the received wisdom was that this was a desktop problem restricted to young male gamers in central Europe. The logic was clear; gaming works best with minimal latency, ads add to that latency so block them. This diagnosis proved hopeful more than helpful. We now believe the problem to be widespread if not catastrophic; however, we believe that if the actions described above are taken by publishers and advertisers whose incentives are aligned the tide can be stemmed. 

The last fortress against adblocking is the mobile app ecosystem but it would be unwise for those players to assume that this is a forever hedge against the same problem. Today this security is created by the inability of third parties to insert the necessary code into any given application, but betting against the ingenuity of those who seek to change that  seems risky at best. 

The adblocking conundrum raises a further challenge to advertisers. The part of the digital experience served by the publisher content management system is readily accepted by users, the part served by the ad management system is not. By consequence access to the former stream becomes an imperative.

Most commonly referred to as native advertising or content marketing this precious real estate calls for a higher bar as the publisher has to consider the  value of sponsored content to the user. This demands the creation of advertiser funded ‘stories’ that are legitimately editorially relevant to the user and this should lead to a developing practice in ‘story finding’ as opposed to story telling. Simply defined story finding is the process of finding ‘authentic’ editorial themes to which brands can attach their own narrative. Doing this requires close vendor collaboration and disclosure to to the user.  The approach is clearly going mainstream as vendors as diverse as Conde Nast, The Guardian, New York Times, Vice and Refinery 29 have all invested heavily in content studios to execute against this demand.

Delivering this solution repeatably and at scale will be onerous but like so much in digital marketing nothing turns out to be as easy as it might have seemed.

@robnorman