I can’t remember when I first started using Firefox, which is about when I started using AdBlock Plus. 2009? In any case, I haven’t seen ads for years and years. Now Apple with iOS 9 is going to start blocking ads in apps. Cool.
I work in advertising and I still have no sympathy whatsoever for the “entities” (they hardly seem like legit companies at this point) that are having their ads blocked.
Here’s a good blog post on the issue:
20 years is plenty: let’s stop waiting for online ads to mature
What I find interesting is that people are defending the advertisers in the comments of articles about this new iOS 9 thing. But here’s my main thought:
Ad-supported content worked for a time (200 years) for distinct cultural and economic reasons, but there was no reason to expect it to last forever.
Let’s go back to 1815. The only media for advertising are the signs on shops, direct sales (street vendors, traveling salespeople, etc.), and print. Literacy is low, and there are very few publications with limited ads. The Industrial Revolution, however, is happening, and people are in general hungry for new goods and information about new goods well into the 20th century and our own lifetimes. Newspapers blow up by the end of the century, producing those quaint print ads that people still have a fun time looking at. Print advertising by its nature is pretty unintrusive, and people are hungry for information anyway. We are in the win-win zone. (Print advertising might have continued to work, but, of course, the Internet is killing it.)
Radio advertising has always been a murky area. Ogilvy basically dismisses it in his book Ogilvy on Advertising:
And that’s from back in 1983. I doubt the situation has improved. The real advertising dough was in TV, but the win-win for advertisers and viewers was fairly short-lived.
It’s easy to forget that that TV is still pretty new. I’m 44, and people my age grew up hearing our parents talk about getting their first TV. Even in the 70s, commercials between and during shows were becoming more numerous, and people were bitching about them. Today, even TV is a in a very precarious position:
So advertisers still pay high rates for shows like Big Bang Theory, even though they get a lot less for their money than they used to. Why? Because TV advertising is still pretty much the only thing that works at all.
TV is not all that different from online: the less things have worked, the more ads they have piled in, the more people get sick of TV and cut the cord completely.
And here’s the final blow to advertising: people are not hungry for commercial messages as they were until the 1980s or so. Nowadays, people mostly have what they want and know what they want.* When they want more information, they will do their own advertising. Let me provide and example, then and now:
1977: Stupid commercial for a shitty beer positioned as premium.
2015: I go on beer advocate and read about 3 Floyd’s craft beers.
Ever see a 3 Floyd’s ad? Yet they have to hide Zombie Dust beer behind the counter because it sells out the moment it gets off the truck. So it is with products people really want. The trouble is, it’s not easy to make such a product these days.*
If you are interested in Tesla cars, you are going to go online and read all about them, on the Tesla website and various reviews. That’s the kind of content I translate and write for Japanese companies: Web content, press releases, press kits, pamphlets. Doing press materials for a new golf club series now. Golfers will look for the information; they won’t have to be beaten over the head with the clubs on TV.
OK, so let’s go back to the Web. In an era when TV shows can barely stay monetized via ads, why on earth should anyone expect to monetize a bunch of shitty Web content via ads? It’s a completely false expectation that derives from the TV model, which barely made it 50 years before it started creaking and groaning.
People skip over ads with their DVR. People use ad blockers to block online ads. Two types of intrusive ads, two solutions.
So, the whole concept of ad-supported content was the product of cultural and technological factors that have come and gone. Companies can either face that reality and adapt or pound sand. I will not be moistening the sand they pound with my tears.
Thoughts?
*People always want more money and more stuff, but when they get the money they simply upgrade what they already have. If I had more money, I would buy a better house and appliances, go on vacations, buy fancy food and booze, etc. And I already feel I know what I would get, and where I lack knowledge, I would autonomously find it. In the 1940s when sales guru Zig Ziglar was starting out, he could make money selling pots and pans door to door. Enough people back then were striving for such basics that that was viable. Today, unless a product is truly new and life-changing, they’re not listening. When a product does fit that description, such as the original iPhone, people will go out and buy it in droves.