Dear Marketer, You Should Install an Ad-Blocker.

Dear Marketer,

You often fantasize about the hockey stick performance shape for their brand. You expect a tedious, slow-building phase and the explosion to unmeasured heights. The sad news, it rarely happens in the world of physical goods, but it often occurs where the marginal manufacturing cost is close to zero after producing the first item. It costs you nothing to sell the 100th Kindle file of your book, the 1.000th download of your Mobile App, or the 10.000th download of your podcast. To me, one of the best examples of exponential growth, with huge implications in our advertising bubble, is the rise of ad blockers.

According to eMarketer, 1/3 of internet users use ad-blocking software; worse, more than 50% of the 18-30 years old do so (source). Ad-blocking is common in western markets and results from years of cluttering web pages and deploying annoying pop-up ads. China took a more extreme route, and ad-blockers were banned. The implications for brands are notable; what can you do, dear marketer?

• First, every marketer should install an ad-blocker. Here is how to install one as a plugin on your browser. It might be counterintuitive to do that when you just agreed to use Internet Display banners on https://www.bbc.com/ for your next campaign. But don’t you want to see the emptiness your audience is seeing precisely? You might then reconsider your decisions.
• Talk to your media agency to understand which media partners restrict ad-blocking (like Forbes or BusinessInsider), how to protect your media budget from ad-blocking behavior, and learn what is safe. I know our agency, Mediacom, is very open to this. Rethink your media delivery and operate in platforms where consumers accept more willingly advertising content.
• Rethink your overall communication strategy: bold advertising doesn’t need to be annoying, and attention doesn’t need to be grabbed with force. In general, don’t execute something you would yourself be tempted to ad-block. Some say it might be too late to fix online advertising, but at least we can try to stop the decline.