The new version of Google Chrome will block “annoying” online ads and close to 30% of people are using ad blockers while some home routers are providing free ad blocking software. In other words “what we have here is failure to communicate”.
Over one-third (35%) of programmatically-traded desktop ad impressions in the United States were fraudulent in Q1 2017. If your company is spending money on online advertising, you are almost certainly being robbed.Google reported that 56% of online display ads that are paid for by advertisers are never seen by a live human being. (And remember, Google is one of the world’s largest sellers of online display ads.) Recently The New York Times ran a story claiming that 57% of online video ads are never seen. CNET reported on a study by research firm Incapsula that found only 38% of traffic on the web is human. Kraft announced that it was rejecting 75-85% of the online ad impressions it was being offered because they were “fraudulent , unsafe, non-viewable or unknown.”
Nearly 50% of marketers don’t know where their ads are running online due to programmatic strategies, according to a study by the Society for New Communications Research of the Conference Board (SNCR). So then why in the hell are brands, and marketers, continuing to pour money into online ads?
We have been trained to “go where the eyeballs are” but the eyeballs don’t want to see our ads because they are intrusive and irrelevant. We were just challenged this year to come up with an online ad strategy that actually worked for a CPG company. Rather than focus on where the ads appeared, at least initially, we focused on making the ads relevant to our audience. We tested concepts, and tested them again until we had some winners. We then ran the ads on sites chosen for their content, not by a computer. We, also, ran some standard, untested ads via a programmatic buy. The results? The ads that had been tested and ran on target sites performed 300% better than ads via programmatic.
Even when we ran the tested ads via programmatic they did not do as well as sites we selected because of a good fit with our audience.
Perhaps the one good thing about the use of ad blockers and blocked websites is that it will force brands to develop better online ads instead of ads that look like they were ripped from a magazine. Until ads are more personally relevant and less intrusive people are going to say no to online ads and to sites that ask us to disable our online ad blockers.
