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.
I’d always felt slightly guilty about running an ad blocker – but when it comes down to it, is it that much different to a popup blocker? Where is the line between what I’m ethically obliged to put up with if I want to access content and what I am allowed to control?
But as the death knell for traditional media, particularly print, has become louder, I have started to worry about losing the content I love.
Last year one of my favourite columnists was sacked. I used to look forward to reading his column each Saturday morning, online or in print. Then there was a brief tussle over wages and staff cuts. He didn’t cross the picket line and was axed. It’s tempting to think back now and wonder whether I didn’t contribute to his departure in smallest of ways.
Adblock Plus is currently getting downloaded by around 700,000 users a week, making it the most popular Firefox extension out there. Ad blocking is just starting to hit the main stream:
But ad blockers are really the tip of the iceberg – the more content becomes digitised, the more control the consumer has over how they consume.
Efforts to fight this transfer of control head-on may slow things down temporarily but are ultimately just teaching users to be pirates and alienating them in the process. BitTorrent used to be the plaything of pimply teenagers and geeks who didn’t get out enough, but now your aunt is downloading full seasons of Lost without ads and the guy next to you on the bus is watching Watchmen on his iPhone.
Dependence on controlling consumption indicates a business model which is at best limited and yet traditional media persist because the alternatives are apparently unthinkable.
So how can the industry be saved? How can the role of the journalist, the author be preserved? Don’t get me wrong – I love pictures of cats and videos of emo teens whining into their web cams, but I suspect I’ll miss high quality, well researched and professionally produced content if it goes.
Google and Facebook are getting it right by building sophisticated systems that appreciate users and their context. Twitter has a great chance of getting in on the act and Last.fm has an incredible opportunity to provide highly relevant advertising to a captive audience. Understanding you, your friends, your interests, your location – having a true “database of intentions” and presenting you with relevant time critical information and advice could be the tipping point between advertising as annoying intrusion to advertising as helpful supplement.
Nic Hodges, creative director of Clemenger BBDO Sydney, puts it well:
“No longer are you selling products that no one wants to solve a problem they never had. You may actually be helping people do stuff they want with people they like in places they want to be.”
But why is it that technologies companies, starting from nowhere, are able to succeed while media companies, who have an enormous head start in audience and content, seem to consistently fail? These products of the Internet age are also getting it right by mostly getting out of the way and being unobstrusive. Call me a hippie, commie, ad-hating loser but I honestly don’t think that full page take overs do anything to develop the relationship between the user and the brand or the user and the site. Add value and get out of the way is the catch cry of the digital age.
Evangelism, advertorial and product placement are also logical directions to take if only because the ad is harder to automatically strip from the content. Some seem to have made the transition from free agent to evangelist successfully and without losing their voice – but it is very fine line and few will be able to walk it successfully.
At the other end of the spectrum is public broadcasting and not-for-profit media. The ABC, the BBC, the PBS and the CBC are all offering content in open, innovative and digital ways. Having a charter that is focused on distributing the highest quality content as broadly as possible rather than focused profits certainly gives them an advantage.
Crowd sourcing projects such as OpenAustralia and Project Democracy help make sense of the masses of information generated by our politicians. While these are poor substitutes for a healthy press gallery they should certainly be studied closely by media companies struggling for relevance.
Finally there is always free magazines and newspapers – MX and Nine to Five seem to be bucking the trend.
For now I’m going to keep my ad blocker off, but somehow I don’t think that’s going to be enough to make the banners a viable lifeline for newspapers.
- A longer version of this article will appear on Gruden’s agency blog shortly
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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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….
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Insightful article. What surprises me is that the ad networks have yet to adpot user ratings of ads – a great way to ensure relevance.
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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.
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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.
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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”!
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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.
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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.
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