Better creative is one place to start. But even stellar ads get blocked if they are delivered via traditional means to users who have already installed ad-blocking technology.
If it’s too late to rely solely on a better creative experience, then we must also provide smarter distribution. This means exemplary brand content served across channels that are unaffected by ad blocking.
This prompts an exploration into native advertising, which has grown over the past several years as a way for brands to distribute branded content, at scale, without any hindrance from ad blockers. But “native” has become a catchall term used to describe everything from advertorials to recommendation engines to sponsored posts.
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The idea of better brand content delivered across channels, without fear of ad blocking could be referred to as “pure native,” and it requires brands to think beyond the basics of advertising.
This isn’t about developing a dynamic display ad and using programmatic pipes to chase the audience. It’s about producing sought-after content, purely native content, which requires five crucial elements:
Adopting this content-rich strategy to address ad blocking demands new and more engaging creative, which will spur agencies to produce more groundbreaking work than ever.
The industry can no longer think about producing ads – it’s now about making compelling brand content.
Perhaps the biggest change here is the way the ad message is pushed to the consumer. Rather than relying on ad servers that promise scale and reach via traditional display placements, brands need to find alternative channels that still reach their target audience.
The ability to place a branded content message in the edit well of a site will help circumvent ad blocking software.
What we’re talking about is facing ad blocking, rather than fighting it. This requires the ad industry to essentially admit its error and move on to fresh tactics.
Addressing ad blocking in this fashion has the potential to save careers and revitalize online advertising. Simply fighting it through lawyers or PSAs won’t have the same result.
In my talks with advertisers, they are kind of aware of the ad blocking issue but not really focus on fixing it yet. So it is mostly publishers will feel the pain for now.
From my experiences in helping publishers dealing with ad blocking, I find out that simply asking users to turn the blockers off sometimes might work wonder. However to pull it off, it depends on two important factors: the quality of the content and the device the visitors are on.
If the content is good enough, the most visitors will go extra length to get it. About the second factor, it has a lot to do with the difficulty of turning off ad blockers on mobile devices. On desktop, to whitelist a domain, it only takes a single click to do so. On mobile device, it takes several steps, so most users won't do that.