The antidote to ad blocking: Authenticity in ad content
It was a niche crowd at first, or so we thought. Ad blocking was confined to the desktop computers of young male gamers in Central Europe, the intelligence seemed to reveal. It made sense: gaming works best with minimal latency; ads add to latency; gamers needed to block them.
Many thought ad blocking would stay confined to this crowd; they were wrong.
Ad blocking is now pervasive, and both publishers and advertisers suffer. 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.
According to GroupM’s latest Interaction report, although ad blocking is less common in Asia, it is only a matter of time: South Korea reports the recent arrival of blocking technology with Western-style consequences. Japan explains that the big blockers have not yet climbed over the language barrier. China points to lower awareness about blockers, and suggests they are less effective because most ads are served by publishers rather than third parties. Singapore reports little impact so far but remains alert. Taiwan also mentions low awareness. Indonesia remarks that its internet traffic is 70 per cent mobile, so structurally less vulnerable. Hong Kong’s advertisers take the positive view that ad blocking is about improving the user experience and are ready to switch to video and native if necessary.
So in Asia, the question is what’s the best way to inoculate against the rise of adblocking here? To answer that, it helps to understand why people really block ads, what they would tolerate or even appreciate instead of the ads they block, and how to give them what they want while still advertising effectively.
Reading the minds of ad blocker users, and trying to respond
Many competing theories purport to explain the rise of ad blocking: latency of site performance, site clutter that harms the user experience, resistance to ad tracking, irritation at being retargeted with products already purchased, and so on. Some hypothesize people block ads simply because they can—they want the superior experience of engaging with content without ads there to interrupt things. Given the ability to eliminate ads, people have no problem doing so and breaching the traditional, unspoken contract between users and publishers that called for the exposure to advertising in exchange for otherwise free content.
In the face of this breach, publishers have responded in various ways. Some have warned users with ad blockers installed that they will block the desired content if the intended ads aren’t viewable along with it.
And some have followed through on that promise. Others have entered into a technology arms race with their site visitors, using technologies to work around the ad blocking technology to reinsert the ads anyway, a controversial practice known as ad reinsertion. These paid inclusion technologies are not any defence at all. Ad blocker beaters are insidious and destructive: they directly violate the user’s asserted preference to not view the ads, and inserting them inevitably weakens the consumer relationship for the publishers as well as any brands reinserted to these consumers.
The above tactics can be valuable, of course, but they don’t strike at the heart of people’s desire for personalised, relevant, valuable, non-disruptive content. Some publishers have vigorously redesigned their sites to improve user experience, making careful decisions about the ads they run and the targeting engines they use for ad placement. They’re working to minimise the latency implications of both the ads themselves and the multiple tags they contain for verification, tracking, and attribution (which can also slow sites down considerably).
The advertiser too can play a role by placing ads that are more relevant to the audience, providing a utility in the form of brand information they actually need and want to know. To deliver ads that meet that standard, advertisers need more granular data and the ability to process it quickly for creative decisioning in real time. Today, many advertisers rely on the same data sets and as a consequence users begin to see repetitive ads, some of which offer them products they’ve already purchased.
The solution
While the granularity of data continues to rise exponentially, the technology and facility for harnessing it in such was to truly personalize each ad is not there yet, leaving the publisher and the advertiser alike in a bit of predicament. How can we advertise in a way that doesn’t undermine consumer relationships?
Here’s where authenticity comes in. It starts with the user experience redesign described above, but to truly reach users, the ad content available on sites has to be as relevant and meaningful as the site’s design, if not more so. Native advertising is a solution that should be fully explored. When done correctly, it enables publishers and advertisers to meet the high bar for not interrupting the user experience, it circumvents the need for individualised data-driven ads, it avoids repetitive ads, and deliver content that carries real meaning for its audience.
Native advertising involves placing advertiser-funded stories—articles about real topics written in narrative style—on websites that publish similar editorial content. The ads should announce that they’re ads (in the spirit of authenticity and full disclosure) but they should otherwise look like editorial content readers would come to expect from the particular publisher. Brands are simply attaching their own narratives to existing editorial themes, playing off of the content users have already self-selected. plista, a native ad specialist, has been very successful in using its proprietary real-time Recommendation Technology to match content and advertising with users’ individual interests across all channels and devices. It is the first in the industry to provide a single source solution for buying in-feed, outstream video, recommendation widgets and in-ad formats across both desktop and mobile inventory.
In Asia-Pacific, native advertising will amount to $14.1bn and the region is slated to record the largest increase in native advertising spend in next five years at a 177 per cent compound annual growth rate, according to a 2016 study by Facebook’s Audience Network, The future of mobile advertising is native. Marketers, media vendors and publishers such as Mashable, Tech in Asia, Mediacorp, have all invested heavily in content studios or set up special units to execute effective native advertising campaigns. It’s a decision they couldn’t take lightly: strong native advertising depends on paying attention to what consumers desire, listening to them, and scaling the content in ways that retain its authenticity but allow it to reach large audiences. It’s not a small undertaking.
In my opinion, however, the effort and expense along with added attention from both publishers and advertisers, are worth it. Advertisers who focus on placing ads that are interesting, entertaining and simply less annoying to a relevant audiences will indeed see a payoff in message delivery. Likewise, publishers must also do their part by redesigning their sites to improve user experience and minimise latency. The fact of the matter is, publishers and advertisers depend on their consumer relationships, and we all know authenticity and understanding lie at the heart of any real, meaningful relationship.
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