Ad-blindness
Ad-blindness Challenge for Marketers
Digital age complications make it hard to reach more consumers who are still blind to banner ads!
Did you know that 2.05 billion people are digital buyers? (Oberlo, 2020). Twenty-five years ago, the first online purchase occurred, and since that moment, its development has been rapid and natural. Thus, digital advertising practices started to spread within companies to achieve organizational goals and target their audience. At the same time, internet users' knowledge increased in the last years, making them more suspicious and untrustful of this type of advertising. However, new challenges are emerging and getting on their track. Ad-blockers are the new challenge that marketers and companies that spend millions of dollars on digital advertising face.
Based on what was said before, ad-blocking is digital technology in the form of a free-to-use third-party internet browser extension. By the end of 2016, 615million devices were blocking ads, which represents a decrease in the online spendings of 14.2 billion dollars in a year, according to Tori's article about the impact of ad-blockers on online consumers behavior (2020). YouTube is one of the most affected companies. They lose, on average, 1.125.313.000 dollars a year and are a perfect example to understand how big this trend is getting and how it is affecting advertisers and marketers, whose expenditures on this type of advertising don't translate into achieving their business objectives effectively.
The principal motivations for the usage amount the adopters of ad-blockers are visual clutter, internet speed; interruption; protection from online tracking and malware, and malicious ads. In a US poll by Pagefair, security (30%) was the main reason cited for downloading an ad-blocker, followed by interruption (29%). Dr. Johny Ryan refers to an interview made by Business Insider in 2017, how the lack of sensitivity and interest that the industry had in the privacy of their consumers accelerated the growth and provided easy access to this internet extension for any user.
Fun Fact - Did you know that
There is a significantly higher usage of ad-blockers among males, based on Researches made by Pagefair!
So, if consumers are not engaging with sponsored content, what to do? Advertisers and marketers are putting all their efforts into strategies for approaching a client that wants to feel closer and related to the brand. It might be necessary "non-pushy marketing," one where the client trusts the brand because their image is transparent and relatable. This kind of tactic is light, fun and helps the brand make an emotional connection with the client offering them products or services (PR Week 2015).
Are you curious to know if we identify the main reasons that will lead an adaptor to uninstall the ad-blocker? The predominant answer is "if online ads were less invasive" (Todri, 2020). The industry should try to know their audience better instead of creating massive ads that might be just annoying to the user.
This is a call for every person involved in the online ecosystem to listen and interpret what users' actions tell us. Otherwise, the functioning of the digital ecosystem and the development not only of e-commerce but also the future of the web could be seriously hampered. It is in our hands.
This article was written by Eliza Jennings as part of Moe’s Consulting team.