Brands’ lack of imagination when it comes to their mobile advertising and customer experience is what’s causing the rise of ad-blocking software according to Jodie Sangster, CEO at ADMA.
Sangster was speaking at Friday’s Daze of Disruption conference in Melbourne and was part of a four-person panel discussing ways to elevate the customer experience.
The reason Sangster believed the industry was now having to deal with ad-blocking software was largely it’s own fault. “There’s a reason why that is and it’s because a lot of advertising isn’t bloody good enough and it has to be better,” Sangster declared.
However, all was not lost. Sangster believed that lots of brands are getting their mobile offering right and they were the ones that offered an “end to end experience”.
“But sure, there’s also a lot of brands who are just putting their desktop banner onto a mobile or you get a pop-up and you can’t close it, or some flashing thing and most people just go, ‘Dear God that was the worst category experience imaginable’.
“And now you have the ad-blocking debate which is front and centre and some devices are blocking ads and some have said that they are going to block ads,” she said.
Sangster didn’t believe ad-blocking was right or fair but the fact that it’s happening at all is something the entire industry needed to acknowledge and look at the reasons to why it was happening.
“It’s time we (as an industry) step up and say that if consumers are going to block ads then we can’t just all go ‘isn’t that terrible’; the conversation needs to be around the reason why people are blocking ads in the first place,” she concluded.
