Idea blocking

It was inevitable. 

It got too easy to spew advertising garbage into every interface. It got too easy for lousy ideas to leak everywhere.

Then the collective patience tipped, and now Apple's iOS 9 makes it possible to ignore bad ideas on our mobile devices. And the result, short term, is that it's now possible to ignore all advertising ideas, regardless of quality or relevance. 

This is an intriguing moment for idea people, especially those working in that subset of advertising making online ads.

What happens to the ad industry when the audience is empowered, enabled and encouraged to deliberately not view what we spend our work days creating? If you’re an advertiser, why would you commission an ad agency to make ads that consumers will block? What happens to the legions of idea people working in advertising if ad-blocking takes hold?

Change. 

On the optimistic side of the response, the growing ease and standardization of ad-blocking presents an opportunity to focus less on quantity of impressions and instead focus on quality of ideas. As Seth Godin noted in response to ad-blocking, "the best advertising is the advertising we would miss if it was gone." It's a fairly simple response, isn't it? Just make the ads better! Perhaps ad-blocking is needed stimulus for the ad industry, on all sides. As BBDO's Digital Lab puts it, "unless publishers band together to improve all advertising, the motivation to use ad blockers remains."

We, the commissioners, creators, producers and distributors of advertising share the blame for polluting the pool so thoroughly -- that another set of idea people, focused on technology, created an idea to block our ideas. 

There are plenty of other nuances here, of course. 

Blocking ads on mobile screens is, in one part, a user experience reaction; but it's also a reaction to greed. The current mobile ad landscape was developed in a rush using already-dated desktop metaphors, with advertisers throwing lots of cash at any publisher with real estate to sell. Which attracted the peddlers of software that will deliver $6.3 billion worth of fake web traffic this year alone, based on research by the Association of National Advertisers reported in Bloomberg Businessweek. 

We all created a perfect environment for ad trash making and fake views, with zero incentive to think of audiences first. #Optimize! #Programmatic! 

Ad-blocking offers a great reason to rethink how advertising might work best for audiences first and foremost. As my coworker David Duncan says, "When technology invents a wall, it [also] quickly invent a taller ladder.” The point here isn't to rethink the words or images or motion -- the concepts -- inside the ads, but the very framework and context of advertising itself on mobile screens.  

Then again, maybe all we're really talking about here is money. Jason Calacanis writes (in a rich analysis - definitely worth your time), "Apple draws the line at stealing content, and doesn't see the subversion of ads as stealing – which all of us in the real world know it is. Undermining a publisher’s ability to monetize is stealing, but it's Robin-Hood, feel-good stealing.” Parse "undermining," and "publisher's ability" as you see fit. #Uber #Napster 

However you slice it, ad-blocking isn't going to decline. Do we take it as victims, see it as an imposed constraint? Or do we use this opportunity to reinvent the way marketers and publishers collaborate to serve their audiences?