Ads-free future: Yes or No?

Experience is shaping everything in the tech industry and more often every physical stuff is known to human are now digitized, being buying options for clothes or booking a cab to travel till OTT for entertainment everything is now in digital space, so does advertising.

Advertising is the key element in revenue generation for many apps known to human, approx. 4 out of 5 apps today earns through advertising in their ad space. There are two models by which these apps are multiplying their revenues:- a) Subscription Model b) Ad Sales, more often ad sales account 60-70% of the business revenue.

We have another set of concepts that is not new in advertising but playing a concentric role in revenue generation, these are known as contextual advertising and native advertising. In contextual advertising, ads remain relevant to the web content and in native it is submerged with the content. For instance, you're reading a blog about fitness, and on the same page gyming equipment advertisements displayed at the corner, this form of advertisement is known as contextual advertising and similarly if a fitness page itself talks about Gold Gym and fitness in the content, then this form of advertisement is known as native advertising. The concept is simple but it does have a huge impact on advertisement's ROI for brands across segments.

The advertising strategies are changing, the technologies are evolving, people are adapting to these changes simultaneously and consumption patterns are evolving in accordance. Given brands becoming more customer-centric the right advertising for the right customer at right time is becoming a key acquisition strategy for better conversions, advertising is becoming much narrower in approach. While talking about offline advertising the numbers are elevating towards negative very quickly but it does some great impacts on consumers in a certain geography and with certain product categories to certain segments of the society. But in the age of information and digital adoption, habit is the key metric for success, and brands are working more on that, that's why when brands found ads becoming irrelevant and annoying to their customers they're adopting the contextual and native form of advertisements, even platforms like Netflix doesn't have direct ads.

Ads-free future may sound like living in la-la land but it is showing some potential in today's world where some entrepreneurs are focusing less on ads more consumers, but the question stands still - what if ADS replenish? This seems not gonna happen not even in the next century because to reach the audience brands will have to communicate their offerings in any way, and that offering will of course be termed as advertising or marketing. So, how it's going to be an ADS-FREE FUTURE? To get the answer to this question we've to look after our behavioural patterns, observe how brands are communicating with us without advertising. Ads are not going away, no never; but will change their form. Sooner or later brands will communicate with us via different creative mediums which directly reaches us at right time but not in the same advertised way like how they're advertising today.

Today's world is about personalized campaigns, tomorrow will be focused campaigns, and the day after tomorrow will be based on our thoughts being parallelly matching with brands, who knows what's the future. But we do know, user experience is everything we don't like being annoyed by ads between our favourite web series. We don't like hearing ads between music or even podcasts. You might have experienced high vocal ads between video or audio content, the sound is increased 10x to annoy you purposefully by apps to cut the smoothness of experience which in turn will shape the compulsion to pay. Here is a quick adaptive strategy to let consumers opt for subscription-based models rather than free models with ads on apps.

• Make sure you're not playing much with customer experience.
• Always try to hook customers with your product.
• Do not irritate them at the beginning by pushing loads of ads.
• Let them become hooked to your product.
• Now it's time to show them a few ads and test for how long they're active on the product.
• Make sure they don't get annoyed and leave your product/app.
• Let your marketing intelligence software and CRM design their persona and heatmaps.
• Let the heatmaps keep progressing and intelligence decide when is the time for customer to become more hooked.
• Let the hook and highly attention time between the content/usage becomes adoptive to the customer. For instance, a customer is more hooked between 5-7 minutes of usage time.
• Let the pattern developed for some days and when the graph becomes stagnated that every time this person uses the app, at 5-7 minutes s/he is highly attentive.
• Now push 1 ad in between for some days, followed by 2 and 3, soon this customer will feel the urge to move from free model to subscription model to avoid ads.
• Because it's the glitch that is annoying his or her user experience, let this experience empowers him/her to pay.
• But do make sure your target audience is someone who is the potential buyer, not a segment who enjoys free being free.
• Also, the subscription model should not have a price too high that the potential customer can't afford. For instance, look at JioSaavn Rs. 399 for the annual premium subscription vs Spotify Rs. 1189 for the annual premium subscription - which one is affordable for Indian consumers?

Ogilvy?is one of the most renowned advertising agencies in the world, so does its parent group?WPP?who own?Wavemaker,?Mindshare,?BCW Global,?Essence?and many more such?#adagencies.

In the 2010s, it was all about building networks, communities, brand presence etc. on social media primarily. And just like the product life cycle, the industry of such advertising grew, transformed and stagnated.

Even the big players like?Ogilvy,?Publicis,?Leo Burnett,?McCann Worldgroup,?Dentsu,?FCB Ulka,?Omnicom,?J. Walter Thompson Worldwide?is spending careful attention to every detail of its?#adscampaign, given "WOKE CULTURE" phenomena.

The 2020s will be all about dealing with clutters, as per 2019 report by?Forbes?publication pointed:

- 47% are blocking ads.

- 22% don't want personalized ads.

- 44% says ads are too intrusive.

- 38% of ads contain viruses and bugs.

Seeing this huge transformation, almost 50% of people say ads are annoying and irrelevant. And given adaption, the majority of them had already started "PAYING" to avoid?#ads.

For instance, look at your music-app many are paying to?Spotify,?JioSaavn?to avoid ads between songs. And on to the different league,?Netflix?is setting an example to be successful in revenue without running?#ads.

So this is how a majority of app players are altering consumer behaviour which in fact will sooner give birth to ADS-FREE future but in a transformed way. No, the ads will not completely fade away but it will transform the way in which it is being communicated. Just like energy cannot be created nor destroyed but transformed from one space to other; advertising will soon become like that. There will be more development in advertising technology in the coming decades but all re-direct towards a better-targeted and centric consumer approach, after all, the customer is the king, content is the queen and advertising is the minister who manages the balance between experience, revenue and growth. Look at Tesla, it has no marketing team but it does land up with good sales, reason is the man himself who founded Tesla - Mr. Elon Musk; Tesla's marketing team consists one-man show, the Musk show, the one-man marketer of a multi-billion business brand.