SUMMARY: More and more consumers are blocking digital ads and cord-cutting and watching less TV than ever before. Consumers are doing everything in their capacity to avoid being interrupted by boring, irrelevant and interruptive ads. What are brands to do?
Traditional TV continues to decline; digital is being increasingly blocked and live TV is being recorded so people can skip ads. Those who don’t skip ads are busy multi-tasking on their mobile devices.
P&G’s Approach: Will It Work?
P&G just worked with Katie Couric Media where it created some short, six-minute news programs with some of its brands — namely Pantene, Olay, and Secret — embedded in them. It has also partnered with Arianna Huffington and Queen Latifah, and hired two black women directors to create content on behalf of the company. Olay basically turned some of their ads into a musical on VaynerMedia. But will it work?
I’m skeptical of efforts like these. The content has to be really compelling and with media sites laying off thousands I’m not sure they can develop content that makes people want to view commercials.
Ad Blocker Statistics
- There are 87% more Ads than two years ago.
- 77% users accepted that they prefer to Add filter over Adblocker.
- 64% of people believe Ads are annoying and they use Adblocker.
- 419 million people have installed an Ad blocker on their smartphones to avoid the Ads.
- $581.07 billion Global Ad spends in 2017.
- 650 million devices now use Adblock.
- Adblock usage grew by 30% in 2016.
- Adblocking costs around $22billion in 2015 alone.
- 74% of Adblock users in the U.S. will leave a website with Adblock walls.
- Only 22% of Adblocker users block Ads on their mobile devices.
- 60% of current Ad blocker users would turn off Adblocking for content.
- 51% have been using Adblocking for 3+ years.
- Globally, the number of people using Ad blocking software grew by 41% year over year.
- 79% respondents believed their browsing experience improved through Adblock.
- Content categories like Entertainment, Gaming, and Sports show the higher-than-average incidence of Ad blocked pageviews.
Who blocks ads?
Ad-blocking users tend to be younger (millennials), educated, tech-savvy, employed with a higher than average salary and are comfortable completing their entire buying life-cycles online. In short, they are a very valuable audience.
Ad-blocking users are up to 80% more likely to make purchases online. They’re also more likely to buy products after seeing an online ad. Ad-blocking users spend more money online on a monthly basis than non-ad-blocking users.
Research from Mozilla suggests that ad-blocking users are 28% more active in the browser and load 15% more pages than non-ad-blocking users.
(Sources: www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/technology-media-and-telecommunications/articles/global-mobile-consumer-survey-us-edition.html https://research.mozilla.org /files/2018/04/The-Effect-of-Ad-Blocking-on-User-Engagement-with-the-Web.pdf)
It’s rumored that the two highest used browsers are going to include ad blockers in future releases of software and many wi-fi mesh router software allows customers to block ads as well.
Maybe we should get the message that ads are becoming stale and that the public has the attention span of someone with ASHD on mega doses of caffeine.
