The Climate Change of Digital Marketing

Dr Johnny Ryan, head of ecosystem at PageFair
Dr Johnny Ryan, head of ecosystem at PageFair

Ever since Apple revealed that iOS 9 would allow users to install ad blocking software to work with its Safari web browser, it feels like ad blocking has never been far from the headlines. Within the last few months, weve seen predictions that ad blocking will cost the industry $21.8bn (£14.2bn) this year, ad blockers are causing massive errors on mCommerce sites, and Digicel become the first MNO to block all mobile ads.

With 15 per cent of British adults now making use of ad blocking software, its clear that we are in the midst of a sea change in attitudes. What once was a niche piece of software reserved for privacy activists is now a common tool, and one that is causing headaches for brands, publishers, marketers and developers.

PageFair is one of a number of services that is aiming to redress this balance by enabling publishers to serve less intrusive ads to users who are employing ad blockers. However, head of ecosystem Dr Johnny Ryan says its not just a matter of outsmarting the ad blocking software.

“It’s important that people know what’s going on, so that they can build a mature response. This is our users giving us customer feedback. They’re telling us ‘there’s a problem with your ads’.”

According to Dr Ryan, the problem dates back to the earliest days of the commercial internet, when publishers were desperate to monetise their content on this new medium, and turned to advertising.

Byyd-ad-blockers.png“In their eagerness to monetise, they allowed advertisers to do crazy things, which started well before the year 2000 with things like pop up banners. So the publisher wasn’t telling the advertiser no enough. The advertiser is going for short term wins, they want results up this quarter, this month, and the agency wants to win awards, so they want to make interesting stuff.

“Over time, the publisher has let the advertiser do things that annoy the user. They’re scooping up and snooping on the user’s data, which, in our surveys of people who ad block, is a major issue. Americans are more concerned about personal privacy online than they are about national security. But even if you aren’t concerned about privacy, we know ads slow the web page down. And even if you’re not worried about the page slowing down, the ads are shouting at you, over each other, obstructing the page.”

At the same time, ad blockers were becoming more and more readily available to the general public, and as the relationship between publishers and users was degraded, more and more people voted with their mouse or finger and chose to block ads entirely, leaving publishers even more desperate to drive revenues from their remaining users.

“The advertiser is doing themselves a disservice by destroying the platforms that they want to be using,” says Dr Ryan. “But the really bad news is that we’re seeing a slow and gradual undermining of the mechanism that has supported free content online for the first 20 years. It’s cataclysmic, but it’s not cataclysmic this week. It’s the climate change of digital marketing.”

Unless something is done to turn back this tide of ad blocking adoption and break the vicious cycle, the traditional model of digital marketing could be facing a dramatic shift in the future, as current models of advertising become untenable.

FB-Instant-Articles.jpg“If this keeps going, we’re going to have a few problems. The first problem is that publishers will retreat from the open web and go behind walled gardens. We’re seeing that already with Instant Articles on Facebook, which I know is only growing slowly, but how crazy would it be if publishers allowed themselves to become just producers of fodder, of a commodity product, and allowed a large tech platform to come in and set the rules, just like they did with music?

“Publishers now are where the music labels were around 2000. The music labels were unable to give the digital consumer a deal that the consumer could accept. It’s the same with editorial content providers now. How do you give users a deal that they can accept? I’d say the first step is to not allow Apple or Facebook or Google or any other large tech platform to become the gatekeeper of all editorial content.

“The publishers, all types of publishers, need to start thinking about the principles that will guide advertising 2.0 on the web. Then they need to bring in the advertisers, and the trustees of the web, people like W3C and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the consumer groups. They need to get some sense of coherence around it.”

News like Digicels adoption of Shine Technologies ad blocking tech shows that mobile networks themselves also have a stake in this battle, making the hunt for a viable new alternative even more complicated.

“Network providers are reluctant to pay the bill for heavy traffic when that traffic generates profit for people other than themselves,” says Dr Ryan. “Now, with network level ad blocking, some networks finally have an opportunity to attempt to force the large media and advertising companies to pay them to permit their traffic to pass over their infrastructure. It is an interesting test case.”

While working to create a more sustainable model for online publishers seems to be an essential task, its also not one that can or should be carried out quickly. In the meantime, there are numerous services that are offering a way to fight back against the ad blockers. But Dr Ryan warns that not all solutions are worth pursuing.

“There’s a list of three absolutely, over-your-dead-body ‘do not do’ things that loads of people are doing. The first one is: don’t just ask nicely. There’s publishers where you go on their website and if you’ve got an ad blocker switched on, there’s an ad there saying ‘Hey, please do us a solid, switch off ad blocker on this site’.

“You would think that might work. I would hope it would work. But in our studies, we had less that one per cent take-up on it. In a way, that’s quite chilling, but it’s also totally predictable. When the remote control was invented, people used it to switch over from ads. We don’t expect people to buy into ads voluntarily.

“The second thing is: don’t push people away,” says Dr Ryan, a tactic which has recently been adopted by publisher Axel Springer on its Bild website. “It is clear to us that unless you have unique, premium content that the visitor can not easily get elsewhere, you should no install a block wall.

“If a visitor can the same AP or Reuters story on site B that they are attempting to view on site A, site As blockwall will be ineffective. However, if site A has the only easily available live stream of a major sporting event, then it certainly can entice the visitor to switch off their blocker.

ad-block-mobile.png“The third thing not to do is play cat and mouse, and here’s where it gets really scary. Ad blocking works by working out where your ads are in your page, based on the code, or by knowing where the ads are served from. It would seem sensible to say, if we fiddle with this every now and then, the ad blocker has to update their list, and if we keep fiddling with it quickly, we’ll be too fast for them.

“So you’re paying a service to do this for you, and it’ll work for a little while. But eventually, the ad block community, and this is not just private companies, but a community of hundreds if not thousands of open source activists, they get so annoyed that they blanket block all Javascript on your website. Everything’s gone. It’s a slap on the wrist to the site, to say ‘Stop playing cat and mouse on your site’. And what happens is, the publisher then has to seek permission from the ad block community to change something on their site. The ad blockers always win.”

While there is still a hardcore community of anti-ad privacy advocates and activists at the core of the ad blocking movement, adoption has now spread well beyond that. Not only that, but the rate of adoption has changed from a steady line to the beginnings of an exponential curve, triggered by changes like the introduction of unskippable pre-roll ads on YouTube.

Nowadays, 80 per cent of those using ad blockers are coming to them based on word of mouth; a family member or a friend who is already using ad blockers recommends them, often due to someones frustration with irritating ads. The remaining 20 per cent are discovering ad blockers because they are now highly positioned in the app stores, and this number is likely to climb following the debut of iOS 9. So can anything be done to slow down this trend?

youtube unskippable preroll ad“We did some survey work with people who ad block last year in the US, and we asked what ads would you be somewhat willing or very willing to tolerate, what ads they could live with?” said Dr Ryan. “The ads that score the worst were pop-ups, unskippable pre-roll, all the worst offenders.

“However, text ads, static display ads, and pre-roll that’s skippable all scored above 60 per cent. And we’ve shown those kind of ads to ad blockers, and here’s the nice surprise: they click 50 to 100 per cent more than non-ad blockers. The answer why is obvious when you think about it – they’re not seeing any other ads.

“We need to reset the balance. This higher volume of ads, that are more intrusive, that snoop on your data, that take up more of your bandwidth isn’t working. What we’re saying is less volume of ads, that do less, that interfere less with your experience, and there are less of them, actually are more effective.

“I think Googles Accelerated Mobile Pages project is interesting. On the one hand, it speeds up mobile sites very dramatically, and resolves many of the ills that drove users to block ads. On the other hand, we have had something similar for some time already, a reading mode on the web browser. So far as I can tell, most users do not use reading more. It remains to be seen whether AMP has more impact.

“We’re not at a point where we’re ready to put ads back on the web and say we won’t provoke a second rebellion. What we want is the publishing industry to go first and lead the way on what ads should be in advertising 2.0. We can do this thing, but we’re gonna be mature about it, we’re not gonna do it until we have a legitimate sustainable solution.

“In this vicious circle, you have one chance to set ads back to a place where they’re acceptable to users, and sustainable for publishers. You have to think long and hard about it before you do it.”