• by Richard Whitman , Columnist, December 7, 2015

Ad blockers are all the rage these days -- and like moths to a flame, when anything's "all the rage," ad agencies are all over it like flies on...OK, that's enough metaphors for one sentence, right?

Anyway, Belgian ad agency Boondoggle decided to jump on the ad blocker bandwagon to use it as a medium to illustrate the challenges that face creatives and also to recruit them. The agency created a banner with an ad-blocking plug in which -- upon ad blocker detection -- was served and read, "You block ads, even if you work in advertising? Then maybe you're the person we're looking for. Join us and let's create campaigns that are really useful to people." 

Upon clicking the banner, people were taken to a page on which the agency had listed available jobs. You can check out a video of the approach here.

It's a valiant effort even though it's just another trendy play at shiny new object syndrome. And really, exactly what does an ad that people don't hate and won't block look like? Does such a thing exist? 

Maybe if creatives were paid based on ad viewership/clickage/response/engagement or some other stupid metric, then, maybe then, we'd actually get creative that wasn't immediately whisked away by rampant ad blocker users. 

Of course if someone's already using an ad blocker, they're not going to see whatever awesome new ad one of these Boondoggle creatives -- or any creative for that matter -- has developed. Unless, of course, the ad, itself, has an ad blocker blocker built in. Which, of course, would just piss of the viewer even further.

There's really no way to win. Sorry to be the pessimist but it's a realistic view of the situation. Please, though, someone prove me wrong.