Guest post: Why I’ve switched off my ad blocker
Mark Stanton, technical director of digital agency Gruden, has decided to start doing his bit to try to avoid the death of traditional media.
I turned off my ad blocker a few weeks back.
I wanted to watch Champions League highlights on the SBS site and they cunningly serve this value-added content from their ad servers. SMH has been doing the same thing some time and I’d been playing this “turn ad blocker off, watch video, turn ad blocker back on” game with them too.
I don’t know if it’s for good, but this time I didn’t turn my ad blocker back on.
Shouldn’t this all have been a wake-up call for traditional media to innovate? It’ll be a while before the general population replaces that little box in the corner with an ‘always on’ home server or such like, and not much can pry me away from my newspapers. But only on Saturday mornings…
It’s the way the winds been blowing for a while. I’m surprised that things like discreetly sponsored downloads and replays haven’t become available more readily or successfully. The old guard are just taking their real-world business model online and wondering why it’s not working.
Seems to me it’s a bit like the oil business in that they’re making their money while they can and won’t innovate until forced too by the markets. It’s a shame that some people and content will fall by the wayside, but the transition to digital being the leader is well and truly underway, and when the revolution comes….
Insightful article. What surprises me is that the ad networks have yet to adpot user ratings of ads – a great way to ensure relevance.
It would be interesting to get data from publishers as to how many ads are ad blocked locally.
And also – how we pay for an impression. ie – if it’s ‘blocked’ … does it still count as an impression and hence you pay for it? Could that explain often large discrepencies between third party ad server data and publisher logs via an Omniture or the like?
Good article! As an online publisher we have walked the fine line between ad $ and audience push back and admittedly have got it wrong occasionally. Our websites are strongly community based and each community is very vocal about what it likes and dis-likes.
OTP’s always guarantees a backlash so about 12 months ago we implemented a policy to stopped accepting them. We knew it would hurt us in the short term but we couldn’t ignore the noise from our customers.
We have never accepted performance ads either, only CPM. We figure we are a premium offering and much like a quality magazine, filling our magazine with OTP’s, fart buttons and credit card ads cheapens the offering.
i think Neil has it spot on … maybe if we (ie all of us) thought more about ad products and making them better, more creative and interesting … and less annoying and intrusive we’d have less people resorting to ad blocking.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Ok the models may need revitisation, but the idea of a world dominated by amateur content is scary. And if there isn’t a business model around developing professional content. then that’s what we’re left with. Sure some amateur content is brilliant, but there’s a lot of dross to sort through. Our news, entertainment and media industries are under threat. It’s simple if they don’t make money they can’t survive. Will the world be a better place if we don’t have professional news outlets and talented creative people producing music, film etc? Or would we be better off in a world where such institutions live side by side the ground breaking independent talent, that for the first time ever has a meaningful channel and opportunity to be discovered. Personally I’m for the latter. Free downloads, free information, free movies, unfortunately, in my view it all comes at a huge price.
I downloaded adblocker last week and noted that 44 million Firefox users had already done so. I also felt a bit strange doing it, but it also provokes me to make sure any campaigns I plan are strong enough – based on consumer/media insight – to become part of the consumer’s experience, not just an annoyance on the periphery. As it’s going to happen anyway we need to embrace it – “keep your friends close but your enemies closer”!
The first thing I did when I moved into online marketing was turn off my beloved ad blocker. I have to understand what other advertisers are doing to get ideas and produce ads which will cut through. How can you be the technical director of a digital agency and have an ad blocker turned on?! Working in digital isn’t just about flashy OTPs. Bread and butter will always be those standard sizes and it’s concerning for your clients that you haven’t been exposed to your competitors’ ads until now.
Ewen: Valid point, but I think you’re misunderstanding my background. I’m a developer, not a creative or an advertiser. The last time I personally worked on a banner campaign was about 8 years ago. My time this week has been spent writing a talk on javascript security, planning how to scale out a cluster of servers and pulling together requirements for a workflow app. And that is more or less how I spend my days.
I am fascinated by what is going on in media industry and am optimistic that once the dust settles we’re going to be left with more than we had when all this started – but my contribution here is as an interested observer, not an insider. I hope it has been a positive one.