• SNL Kagan, Thursday, March 3, 2016 8:19 AM

SNL Kagan interviewed Dax Hamman, chief product officer at Rubicon Project on a wide range of topics. Hamman's thoughts on ad blocking are notable. First off, he doesn't see ad blocking as a threat because "we want to hear the consumer's perspective. As an industry, I do not think we have engaged with consumers enough, and that made ad blocking inevitable. Adtech companies are now trying to correct that by understanding consumer preferences by analyzing data." Hamman maintains what many have said: ad blocking is the consumer's message to the industry and marketers that they "suck." He added, "Many will have had the experience of visiting an e-commerce website and feeling like they are being stalked for months on end." That's due to retargeting, of course.

Consumers are retargeted for weeks on end even after they've made a purchase or returned an item. Hamman believes in advertising: "Advertising is the lifeblood of the Internet. Without advertising, the content that you and I enjoy would not exist. Take YouTube Red, Google's offering of an advertising-free YouTube; it costs $9.99 a month. Google just told you what you're worth for YouTube alone: $10 a month, $120 a year. Are you really going to pay that for access to YouTube, access to a newspaper site you might like? You are not. Therefore, without advertising, the Internet will look very different and consumers will not get the content that they're looking for. So there has to be a balance: the world needs advertising in it but advertising needs to become better quality and provide a better experience for the user. But it certainly should not be deemed as irritating."

 

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