The ad blocking panel at Ad Age’s Digital Conference agreed on one thing: It’s an issue in the short-term, and better content might be one way to combat it. But give it five years and there may not even be an issue at all.
“Ad blocking will still exist, but I think it’s a fad,” said Shenan Reed, president of digital for WPP’s MEC in North America. “It’s going to start to wane a bit and we’ll get over the newness syndrome.”
Ms. Reed also took some of the blame on behalf of advertisers. “Pages have way too many ad units,” she said. “We were killing this industry when we decided pop-ups are a good idea. We made [ads] bigger and more viewable. We created an interruption experience as opposed to an engagement experience. We need to resell advertising back to the customer to make them feel like we’re doing them a service.”
“We did this to ourselves,” said Jen Soch, VP-commercial delivery from The Guardian, sharing some of the blame on behalf of publishers. “We took ads that were inappropriate for publishers and that consumers don’t like.”
