Communications Strategy: Part 2

This is the second in a series of excerpts from my podcast interviews where I am asked about Communications Strategy.

Q: Mark, an article in the Harvard Business Review describes your work as “the most successful (strategy) in human history.” What is that all about?

A: That HBR article was about a grass-roots “protest movement” that I created. That particular communications strategy drove our client to become the #1 most-downloaded browser extension ever – we took them to 1+ Billion (that’s with a B) inside of 39 months, so we were actually growing faster than Facebook for a while. And we managed to do all of that without changing a single thing in the product itself – it was entirely smart storytelling and our culture-hacking communications strategy.

The product that I was asked to market was a browser extension that could hide certain page elements and customize the way your browser renders a web page by applying various filter lists to alter what data the browser fetches – among which was the data call to ad servers to fetch advertising content. So… it could block ads! But the way it was being positioned and marketing was a mouthful to explain and the benefits seemed relevant only to very technical users. The product, which is called Adblock Plus, had been in the market for 7 years already but downloads hadn’t really taken off.

When I took a look at the product it was clear to me that it had lots of potential. But creating mass-market consumer demand meant we would have to radically simplify the story and make it so compelling and urgent that people would want to share virally. Simplifying the message to “It blocks ads” was easy enough, but that message alone was insufficient to trigger viral sharing because people get really conflicted about blocking ads – a lot of people feel like they are cheating the system somehow. We had to make blocking ads a positive force for promoting better quality advertising. In fact, Adblock Plus was carefully designed to block only ads that grossly over-stepped reasonable guidelines.

To engage some viral sharing, we looked to cause marketing as a model and looked for ways to put more emotion into our communications strategy. We figured we could tap into consumers’ pent-up annoyance toward predatory advertising and re-direct that energy toward crowd-sourcing a definition of “acceptable” advertising. Our strategy was to position the Adblock Plus extension itself as much more than a blocking tool; we presented it as a way for an average person to stand up and protest for what is fair and right. I wrote out an actual Bill-of-Rights style manifesto that people could sign, declaring their demands for respectful and non-predatory ads, which gave consumers a way to take agency.

Then I took that manifesto to the extreme: I brought in some friends at EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) to help me write it and give me legal advice; I asked a friend who was like hire #9 at Reddit to help me populate r/adblock to get some viral conversations going; I talked to friends of mine who worked at advertising agencies to socialize what we were doing within the ad industry; I lobbied friends at Mozilla Foundation; I even found a contact at the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) to clear with them what we were doing and make sure they knew we were championing consumer rights. Essentially I rallied an entire community around the idea that we could work together to elevate the quality of advertising.

Now the product wasn’t just about blocking some ads on your computer anymore -- it was about sending a clear message to the advertising industry where you draw the line! It was about releasing your pent-up annoyance in a positive way! To give you some idea, our best-performing hashtag was #BlockYou.

Best of all, the press loved all the fuss and gave us constant attention and coverage, which really amplified the movement. The result was that we hit a cultural nerve: we earned tens-of-thousands of press articles including mainstream press like TIME and Wall Street Journal; radio personality Howard Stern talked about us on his #1 broadcast; the TV comedy series South Park did an episode about it; Goldman Sachs invited me to speak on stage at their Internet Investor Conference; and more. The Adblock Plus product become a mainstream cultural reference point.

Even better, our world-wide consumer protest with 1+ Billion downloads in just months -- plus all the press attention -- put pressure on Facebook and Google and everyone else in the advertising ecosystem to clean up their act. Before our ad-blocker protests, consumers were helpless and resigned to getting ever-more aggressive pop-up ads and pop-under ads and auto-play ads and malvertising. Today, most of those intrusive ad techniques have actual industry-sanctioned bans.

We basically reformed an entire industry. In addition to the article that you mentioned in Harvard Business Review, they ended up writing a full Harvard Business School Case Study about my communications strategy, which is now being taught in several MBA programs. It was a mission-driven movement and definitely one of the proudest in my career.