Ad blocking. You can hate it, you can love it but the truth is both publishers and marketers spend a lot of time and energy with this topic these days.

And the reason is very simple: “One out of five smartphone owners are now using ad blockers, which have become especially popular in emerging markets“. [The Verge]

• the number of smartphone owners using ad blocking software has risen by 90 percent over the past year, reaching nearly 420 million people worldwide
• about a quarter of all U.S. internet users, nearly 70 million people, will use technology to block online ads in 2016, either on their desktop or laptop computers or on their smartphones [IBT]

“74% of the ads are annoying“, says Jim Norton adding that “when we’re not doing a great job, it’s simple, our ads are being blocked“.

Head of Global Sales @ AOL, Jim belives that advertisers must change the way they are thinking about the content they are creating.

In order to do that, programmatic results must be taken very seriously, confessing that:

• more than 50% of our ads runs programmatic
• specific audiences, at specific time crave specific ads

“Do you know why more than 1 in 4 ads are being blocked? It’s because we don’t treat empathy as an emotion“, pointed out Jim Norton, during his 5 minutes presentation about the future of the industry @ dmexco.

Another great insight on this topic comes from Ryan Holmes. CEO & Founder @ Hootsuite, he urges us to “forget about the millenials. Generation C is now our target“.

What is “Generation C”? Actually, it’s simple: First, we talk about a connected consumer, people that use mobile devices and social media in the same time.

The big difference it’s the fact that Generation C is “age agnostic”.

“Gen C is a powerful new force in culture and commerce. Sixty-five percent are under 35 but they span the generations, empowered by technology to search out authentic content that they consume across all platforms and all screens, whenever and wherever they want“. [ThinkWithGoogle]

These are the users Ryan Holms thinks that must be targeted in order to avoid ad blocking. “Create a customer jorney in scale” and the threat becomes a challenge.

More about ad blocking in our ICEE Academy:

• Arvid Tchivzhel/ Director-Prod Development and Data Science Services @ Mather Economics
• Oliver Meister/ Director, Business Development & Legal @ Oriel Ventures