The online advertising business, which has for years struggled against a rising tide of ad blockers by deploying ever-heavier and more-invasive ads, this week publicly acknowledged the error of its ways.
"We messed up," begins the post by Scott Cunningham of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), which represents 650 advertising and tech companies that produce 86 percent of all Internet ads in the US.
Cunningham makes the case that advertising was a huge boon to the early Web by making so much content freely available on demand, but he admits ads eventually got so slow and intrusive that they actively damaged the user experience.
Through our pursuit of further automation and maximization of margins during the industrial age of media technology, we built advertising technology to optimize publishers’ yield of marketing budgets that had eroded after the last recession. Looking back now, our scraping of dimes may have cost us dollars in consumer loyalty. The fast, scalable systems of targeting users with ever-heftier advertisements have slowed down the public internet and drained more than a few batteries. We were so clever and so good at it that we over-engineered the capabilities of the plumbing laid down by, well, ourselves. This steamrolled the users, depleted their devices, and tried their patience...
We lost sight of our social and ethical responsibility to provide a safe, usable experience for anyone and everyone wanting to consume the content of their choice.
This isn't, however, an admission that the ad blockers were right all along. Cunningham still believes that the "rise of ad blocking poses a threat to the Internet and could potentially drive users to an enclosed platform world dominated by a few companies," and he says that the ad industry has the right to "push back" against ad blocking at the corporate level. (This appears to be a reference to companies like Apple, whose iOS 9 recently brought ad blocking plugins to the mobile masses, and to vendors of ad-blocking software like Adblock Plus.)
IAB isn't publicly attacking end users who block ads, however, talking in much more measured language about the importance of the "user experience."
This distinction was made in more pointed fashion back on September 22 by Randall Rothenberg, the CEO of IAB, who called ad blocking a "potentially existential threat to the industry" and added, "As abetted by for-profit technology companies, ad blocking is robbery, plain and simple—an extortionist scheme that exploits consumer disaffection and risks distorting the economics of democratic capitalism. [But] when implemented by consumers, ad blocking is a crucial wakeup call to brands and all that serve them about their abuse of consumers' good will."
In response to user concerns about security and battery life concerns, IAB is rolling out something called L.E.A.N.—which stands for "Light, Encrypted, Ad choice supported, Non-invasive" ads. The goal is to address privacy and security by (finally) serving up encrypted ads and to reduce the size and processor-hogging power of animated and video ads. In addition, IAB wants advertisers to do a better job of not aggravating users by, for instance, making sure someone "is targeted appropriately before, but never AFTER they make a purchase."
Technical specs for the program don't yet appear to be available, and L.E.A.N. ads will still coexist with traditional, "heavy" ads. But L.E.A.N.'s goal is rebalancing the Web's basic bargain—watch ads, get free content—so that the one feels worth the other.
"If we are so good at reach and scale, we can be just as good, if not better, at moderation," Cunningham concludes.
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