The relationship between consumers and advertising is changing. Advertising has fueled the explosive growth of the Internet and mobile media, bringing access to valuable content, services and applications at little or no cost to consumers.  However, much of this growth has taken place without enough attention to user experience. Consumers have become increasingly frustrated with ads that disrupt their experience, interrupt content and slow browsing.

Consumers’ dissatisfaction with ads has created one of the biggest challenges for advertisers worldwide: ad blocking. According to Deloitte, As of mid-2015, there were an estimated 200 million monthly active users of ad-blockers on PCs globally, with 77 million active users in Europe and 45 million in the United States alone. eMarketer reported that in 2016 69.8 million Americans will use an ad blocker, a jump of 34.4 percent from last year. The same report found that next year, that figure is expected to grow another 24 percent to 86.6 million people.

If publishers cannot contain ad blocking, they will risk denying marketers access to valuable audiences and increasing the price of online advertising significantly.

So what are we doing about it?

In an effort to improve the relationship between consumers and advertisers, the Coalition for Better Ads was unveiled at dmexco in September. The Coalition is a cross-industry effort, through which trade groups, marketers, agencies and publishers have come together to show their commitment to improving the advertising experience for Internet users. All of the big hitters in the industry – marketers, including Unilever and P&G; agency groups and media companies, including GroupM, Google and Facebook; trade associations like the 4A’s, ANA, IAB, DMA and publishing giants like Newscorp, New York Times, Washington Post and more — are throwing their weight behind the initiative.

The Coalition will work hard to improve integrity across an array of issues in digital advertising, from user experience to fraud, viewability and more. It makes sense that we are dealing with some of these problems, considering how young the industry still is: it’s still having growing pains. But it’s also important that we start to address these issues now. Ad blocking won’t be our last hurdle, and The Coalition is well positioned to guide the industry through this challenge and the ones to come.

Part of overcoming ad blocking involves communicating the value exchange between advertising and access to free content with the internet user. However, whilst it is vital that we make this understood, we can’t, in clear conscience, have the conversation until we have addressed the poor user experience that is driving consumers to ad blocking. To begin to do so, The Coalition will do the following:

• Create consumer-based, data-driven standards:  These standards will be based on consumer research, giving online advertisers the ability to use these standards to improve the consumer ad experience. It’s important that the industry sets these standards and that this is not led by ad-reinsertion or ad blocking companies.
• Develop and deploy technology to implement those standards: This will be done with the help of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Tech Lab.
• Encourage awareness of the standards: We plan to promote these standards to consumers and businesses in order to ensure wide uptake and elicit feedback.

Coalition member IAB has already begun this important work. IAB released its new formats and standards for ad units, which they hope will have a major impact on user experience and help to stem the tide of ad blocking. In IAB’s efforts to produce a better user experience, they announced the new flexible ad formats that are intended to make it easier for publishers and advertisers to deliver ads easily across multiple devices and screen sizes. The proposed standards would also ban pop-up ads that appear automatically, as well as fixed-size expansion ads that cover up part of the adjacent editorial content.

IAB’s proposed standards are also intended to conform to their own guidelines for L.E.A.N. ads. L.E.A.N. is an acronym for Light, which addresses latency; Encrypted, which ensures consumers’ data is kept safe; Ad choice, which ensures different formats are supported and are privacy compliant; and, Non-invasive, a quality that would help eradicate formats that encourage ad blocking, like pop-ups, non-skippable video, interstitials and more.

While there is a great deal of hard work ahead of us, the Coalition for Better Ads is certainly a step in the right direction, and it is a great sign of unity in our industry. By working together through the Coalition, marketers, agencies, publishers and the ad tech community will make consumers’ experiences of the ad-supported web vastly better. Skeptics may predict that it will be difficult to attract users that have experienced ad blockers back to an advertising-led model. While I’m not inclined to agree, if that is true, then taking action is still essential so we can to retain the 80 percent that has not defected yet.

If you would like to learn more about the Coalition for Better Ads visit www.betterads.org. We will keep you apprised of all of our hard work and are looking forward to supporting quality content on the Internet for years to come.

Link to the original article from MediaPost can be found here.

Whilst desktop and laptop adoption rates hold steady, the PageFair AdBlocking Goes Mobile Report indicates the next challenge will come from mobile web and in app adblocking.

The assumption that adblocking is the domain of tech-savvy young audiences no longer holds true. Adblocking is part of the new digital advertising ecosystem norm.

But why?

The competing theories of bandwidth impact (download latency and telecom costs), privacy intrusion (tracking and targeting) and interruptive advertising (quantity and quality) seem to distil down to simply ‘ads are annoying’ for some consumers.

For UK publishers, it is difficult to quantify the exact revenue risk but it is clearly proportional to dependence on digital ad vs other revenue streams.

There is a win-win-win, consumer-publisher-advertiser scenario – we just need some time to scale and deliver it.

For the advertisers, who pay only for impressions which are not blocked, it’s not about ad spend wasted, but instead how increasingly difficult it can become to reach valuable target audiences when more consumers are opting out of advertising.

In response to the economic challenge adblocking presents to publishers, some have opted to implement the controversial practice known as ad reinsertion.

Ad reinsertion occurs when a publisher uses a technology solution to circumvent consumer adblocking technology – perpetuating a tech arms race.

Equally some adblocking services have agreed to white list and let pass advertising in exchange for a revenue share agreement with a publisher. In either case, the consumer may be exposed to advertising when they believe they have specifically opted out.

Many, including GroupM, worry that negative feelings stimulated in these consumers could be directed toward the brands whose advertising is shown.

Good news

The good news for advertisers and publishers is that consumers seem to be open to a dialogue about the value exchange between exposure to advertising and access to free content.

The latest IAB UK adblocking Consumer Usage and Attitudes report indicates consumers have seen publisher notices (tested by UK publishers including City A.M, The FT.com, The Telegraph and Trinity Mirror) and more than half are willing to switch off adblocking for favourite, some or all sites.

The industry challenge therefore is not to counter adblocking through ad re-insertion or paid re-inclusion but to evolve, as we have done many times over the last 20 years, our use of technology, data and design to focus on relevance, engagement and creativity.

We are already heading in this direction with the Coalition for Better Ads, IAB led LEAN and DEAL initiatives, individual publisher communication and advertising acceptance strategies, and across the board responsible questioning of the use of data.

There is a win-win-win, consumer-publisher-advertiser scenario – we just need some time to scale and deliver it.

Link to the original article from Marketing Tech can be found here.

In part, ad blockers have enabled consumers. About 32% of web users — 86.6 million U.S. consumers — used or will use ad blockers in 2016, according to eMarketer. That’s up from 69.8 million in 2016.

Meanwhile, Google recently announced that it was cracking down on “intrusive” interstitial ads on mobile. After January 2017, pages where content isn’t easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results “may not rank as highly,” Doantam Phan, a product manager at Google, wrote in a recent blog post. In general, Google has taken the stance that it would rather try to fix ads than give consumers the tools to block them. Facebook and others have also joined the Coalition for Better Ads to attempt to address this problem head on.

Those companies are reacting — perhaps preemptively — to consumer ire over excessive ads. Advertisers would be wise to take such concerns to heart as we head into 2017, when consumer intolerance over such ads will hit a fever pitch.

How we got here

Mobile media has quickly become the main event for advertisers. In 2016, U.S. consumers spent an average of three hours, eight minutes a day engaging with mobile media versus two hours, 11 minutes on the desktop, according to eMarketer.

As Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers Analyst Mary Meeker has noted, though, mobile ad investment hasn’t risen at a comparative rate. In fact, there’s a major shortfall, which Meeker has dubbed a $22 billion opportunity.

Marketers have been reluctant to funnel more money into mobile because they haven’t yet found a winning ad format. Instead, they have jammed the mobile interface with every type of annoying ad possible, including the dreaded “hit X to close the ad” format, which enrages consumers. It’s no wonder that as much as 60% of click-throughs on mobile are accidental.

Consumers have said, “Enough.” According to a report this year from PageFair, some 22% of mobile users now use ad blockers for the mobile web. (In-app ad blockers aren’t yet prevalent, but such technology exists.)

Where we go next

To address Meeker’s gap and to keep more consumers from rejecting mobile ads, the industry needs to band together to improve the experience. Moves by publishers like Google are a good first step. However, out-of-control ads on the mobile web — driven in part by attempts to meet viewability thresholds — will keep users fleeing to walled gardens like Facebook.

That’s why advertisers and publishers should start being more selective about the ads they run, and think of the user experience.

The industry might also want to add another metric to its already long list: consumer intolerance. While we’re calculating click-through rates and conversions, we might ask how many users were annoyed by the ads they saw. Considering the current momentum for ad blockers, this is something the industry should seriously consider.

Research has shown that the more intrusive the ad unit, the less of an impact it makes. For instance, consumers find skippable video largely unintrusive — but they also find it the most impactful. As Google well knows, consumers see interstitials as intrusive, and therefore unimpactful. These attributes — or, better said, annoyances — can be measured merely by asking consumers.

Considering all of the actions the industry has taken recently with regard to viewability, “intrusiveness” should be another metric.

Taking into account the relative level of annoyance that an ad elicits would offer a clearer sense of the way forward for the industry. Media can’t sustain itself if ad blockers are the norm.

Already, a lot of publishers are pushing back against ad-blockers. This is good, since research shows that many consumers aren’t aware of the fact that “free” content is supported by ads. However, if consumers intruded upon, they’re not going to be in a great frame of mind to hear a marketer’s message. That’s why we, as an industry, need to get our house in order before consumers write us off. Otherwise, we risk less effective ads, and advertisers that are less apt to invest in them.

Link to the original article from Advertising Age can be found here.

• The Wall Street Journal reports ad blocking appears to be on the decline in Germany, a sign that use of the technology may also slow in the U.S. soon.
• The Journal points to data from the German digital media trade group Bundesverband Digitale Wirtschaft, which show ads were blocked on 19.1% of German desktop page views for Q3 of 2016. That number is down 21.5% from the year-ago period and makes for the fourth quarter in a row of ad blocking declines.
• Germany is a key market for ad blockers, with 25% of German internet users using the technology in 2015 compared to just 15% in the U.S., according to the tech vendor PageFair. As a result, marketers and executives often see Germany as an indicator of where ad blocking trends will be headed stateside.

Dive Insight:

Widespread use of ad blocking technology has forced many marketers and publishers to go on the offensive in 2016, leading to the launch of initiatives like the Coalition for Better Ads. These efforts are too nascent to have a huge impact in mitigating the adoption and use of ad blockers, but a more aggressive approach from publishers might be convincing some users to turn the software off in the meantime.

The Journal points to the German publisher Bild, which has started to completely stonewall any visitors enabling the technology. Stateside publishers like Business Insider and, most recently of note, The Atlantic have adopted similarly tough stances, with the latter forcing users to either whitelist its site or pony up for a subscription.

One caveat to the Bundersverband data is that it appears to focus on desktop webpage views when mobile is really the area where marketers and publishers should be more concerned in reference to ad blockers, as users are spending more time than ever consuming content on devices like smartphones. Adoption of mobile ad blocking is a more recent phenomenon than on desktop, but shows signs of being on the rise, and, as desktop has proven, it can be incredibly hard to get users to switch ads back on once they’ve become used to an ad-free experience.

“If [ad blocking] stays on the desktop, it will be fine for us. If it moves to the mobile it will be a very big problem,” Bertrand Gie, the head of new media at Le Figaro, told Digiday in October.

Link to the original article from MarketingDive can be found here.

In this guest post, Digital Amplification & Trading Director for Ikon Communications, Dru Nho, puts his heart on his sleeve about the ongoing issue of ad-blocking, talks about why “online ads suck” and what this means for advertisers moving forward

What’s the news?

Ad-Blocking. That’s the news. I get it. You don’t care. Viewability is hot right now. I mean, its not even at critical mass in Australia yet right? What only 12-15 per cent penetration? Out of 20 million users, that’s only two – three million? Drop in the ocean.

But don’t forget, that drop causes ripples…

What evidence? Let’s review the last few weeks…

1. ABP (Ad-Blocker Plus) – the world’s largest ad-blocker has audaciously attempted and somewhat failed to launch their own SSP offering. Ironically, they have named it the “Acceptable Ads Platform”. Now it seems they have even backflipped.

2. “The Coalition for Better Ads” – has been formed to battle the rise of ad-blocker usage. Sounding like a digital advertising version of the Avengers, it is supported by members including Google, Facebook, Unilever, Proctor & Gamle & GroupM. All lead by Nick Fury – the IAB.

3. IAB Australia Ad Blocking Taskforce – carrying on the trend of Marvel/DC (depending where your allegiance lies) themed groups, the IAB in Australia have created a taskforce where some of the Australia’s largest and influential agencies, vendors and tech partners in a forum to discuss the best strategy to deal with the up-rise in ad-blocking in Australia.

4. Bye-Bye IAB Rising Star.

Why is this happening?

Because right now, online ads suck.

Sorry. Too harsh. There are two main reasons:

1. Users find the ads annoying, non-relevant and essentially something which ruins their overall online browsing experience. In a study conducted by the IAB earlier this year they found that users wanted an “uninterrupted, quick browsing and a streamlined user experience”.

2. The value exchange. It is clear that in this day and age that the consumer is in complete control. The IAB found that “56 per cent of consumers surveyed were not aware that blocking ads meant that websites would lose revenue”. The Ying to our Yang.

What does this mean for advertisers?

Here are some numbers that should scare us all:

• Globally, the number of people using ad blocking software grew by 41 per cent YOY.
• The estimated loss of global revenue? $21.8 BILLION.
• With the ability to block ads becoming an option on the new iOS 9, mobile is starting to get into the ad blocking game. Currently Firefox and Chrome lead the mobile space with 93 per cent share of mobile ad blocking.

The global figures are staggering. The local figures? Who knows. Currently the industry believe that the prevelance of ad-blocking is anywhere between 10-15 per cent. The monetary effect? Anyone’s guess.

Ok. Your next question: “So what can we do about it, and if it’s so low here, why should we care?”

Answer number 1: Educate yourself and engage not only your clients but also your partner agencies. Here are a few starters:

IAB Reports

1. “Tech Lab Publisher Ad Blocking Primer”
2. “Ad Blocking: Who Blocks Ads, Why & How to Win Them Back”
3. “Ad Blocking User Experience Recommendations”
4. “Australia Ad-Blocking Tool Kit 2016”

Page Fair Reports

1. “2015 the cost of ad blocking”

2. “Ad Blocking Goes Mobile”

Answer number 2: Because this iceberg is coming whether you like it or not.

Australia model ourselves so closely to our global brethren (US, Asia and Europe) for all other digital trends. Are we silly to think ad-blocking won’t be one of them either?

My Point of View

Rather than suggesting that we wait for further information or to monitor progress closely, it’s time for us to get our heads out of the sand and start steering this ship in the right direction. Perhaps the following is a good start:

• Get it on the radar. Engage not only clients, but also your creative partners and publishers. Habits are easily broken. It is an industry issue and it affects us all.
• Measure, review and repeat. Being the most accountable and measurable media channel means that there are no excuses to not use third party tools to measure and assess our ads. Whilst ‘ads-blocked’ is not a variable you can measure, we should be assessing the effectiveness and quality.
• Apply some common sense. Whilst at times it can seem that common sense in our industry is not that common, let’s not forget that we are in fact – consumers. If you wouldn’t engage with an ad? Why would others?

The iceberg is ahead of us and we have the choice to either start thinking of a method to avoid it or end up like Jack and realise too late, only to end up sinking to the bottom of the ocean. Even though Rose clearly had enough space on that float, all she had to do was bloody move over but was being mad stubborn as hell.

There’s a lesson in there for all of us. #justsayin.

Link to the original article from B&T can be found here.

Marketers are taking the quality of their digital ads more seriously than ever, but whether a few tweaks will be enough to rebuild consumer confidence and position the industry for a vibrant future remains unclear.

Consumer interest in ad blocking software has caught publishers’ and marketers’ attention, with concern growing over interstitials and other ad formats often perceived as intrusive or otherwise delivering a subpar user experience. The industry’s alarm is evident in IAB’s recent overhaul of standard ad portfolio guidelines — its first in years — and the formation of the Coalition for Better Ads, which brings together Google, Procter & Gamble and a number of industry groups worried about the effect of ad blocking.

These and other efforts face two towering stumbling blocks that could require a jackhammer more than a chisel to produce any meaningful advancement in quality: The outdatedness of current infrastructure and the number of stakeholders whose business models are built on precisely the kind of ads that consumers find most objectionable — and who are therefore reluctant to embrace change.

“We are still using a lot of the same formats that were built in 1997,” said Deirdre McGlashan, chief digital officer at MediaCom, during a panel discussion about ad blocking and ad quality at last month’s Dmexco event in Germany. “The industry, the content, everything has evolved so much the last 20 years, and a lot of the units are the same.

“It is time for us, as an industry, to look at everything and almost start from scratch and redraw it to what is going to be sustainable into the future.”

Brand safety

So far, ad blocking’s impact has been felt most by publishers, whose advertising revenues are diminishing as a result of the growing practice. But the growth of ad blocking is also a very tangible sign that there is a bigger underlying issue — one that impacts brands.

Marketers have been harder to convince that ad blocking is a problem, as they don’t pay for ads that are blocked. But if publishers figured out how to circumvent ad blockers — which is something Facebook is working on — it would simply reintroduce annoying ads to the user experience. This is not a long-term solution as it would only further undermine consumer confidence in advertising.

For this reason, there is growing recognition among industry players that the best way to deal with the problem is to improve the quality of ads.

“In a way, we don’t have an immediate stake in the current ecosystem,” Stephan Loerke, CEO of the World Federation of Advertisers, said during the Dmexco panel. “However, we do have a stake in making sure that the attraction with the consumer that is happening is welcome. Otherwise, the money we are throwing at the consumer is not well invested.

“So this idea that you start checking that what you deliver and the way you deliver it is welcomed is, for us, essential,” he said.

A long-ignored problem

The sheer size and importance of digital marketing is another reason that the concern over quality is happening now. If digital marketing still accounted for just 10% of budgets, marketers might not be paying so much attention to the user experience. In fact, it is precisely because the industry has long ignored quality to focus on other issues that it has landed in such hot water. But eMarketer forecasts total digital ad spending will surpass TV for the first time in 2017, a significant milestone. This means that marketers are investing a whole lot of money into digital ads that a growing portion of consumers are blocking or are frustrated with.

The industry is also paying the price for giving away content for free for years in order to build traffic. The unwanted side-effect is that a generation of younger consumers doesn’t understand the costs behind content, which has traditionally been underwritten by ads. But calls for the industry to educate consumers about the value exchange between content and advertising as a way to address ad blocking may have to wait until trust has been rebuilt.

“Our contention is you can’t have that conversation without fixing the user experience first,” John Montgomery, global executive VP of brand safety at GroupM Connect, told Marketing Dive. “Ad blocking is something we haven’t had to deal with before. There is evidence if we fix the user experience, there is likely to be a slower growth in the adoption of ad blocking.”

Tackling the problem

Founded just one month ago at the Dmexco conference, the Coalition for Better Ads is positioning itself to lead the way in finding and implementing a solution for the quality problem around digital ads. The group, whose founding members include Google, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, The Washington Post and a handful of leading advertising and marketing associations, will primarily focus on addressing consumers’ concerns that Internet sites and services are being gummed up by intrusive ad practices.

For an issue as far-reaching and thorny as ad quality, it is a fair question to ask if a coalition of industry bigwigs — who do not necessarily represent the interests of all marketers — can effectively tackle it. But if history is any lesson, then the Coalition for Better Ads just might have a chance.

We need only look to the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA), an independent nonprofit that establishes and enforces privacy practices so that when consumers see a targeted ad, they can access information about where the data was collected from that resulted in that ad being delivered. The DAA grew out of a coalition of advertising and marketing trade associations that were able to make enough headway on the privacy issue for the group to stand on its own.

One lesson the Coalition for Better Ads can take from the DAA example is that consumers want more control.

“As we talk to companies, they see that their consumers want to engage and want to have control, and we offer that,” Lou Mastria, DAA’s executive director, told Marketing Dive. “At the industry level, folks see that the program is working the way it is supposed to.”

A global effort to defeat ad blocking

What is somewhat unique about the Coalition for Better Ads compared to other similar industry efforts is its breadth.

“What is important is that it is global. It spans everybody, marketers, agencies, etc.,” Alanna Gombert, general manager of IAB Tech Lab, explained to Marketing Dive. “A lot of our initiatives have not been global in nature. This is very specifically global.”

Such a broad push as this is a lofty goal, but the expansiveness of these efforts could be a challenge.

“I am reasonably optimistic on the basis of alignment across the ecosystem to take this very seriously and to address this head on,” WFA’s Loerke said. “The jury is still out. We’ve never done it on a global scale, roll out ad standards on a global scale which are locally relevant, so I don’t want to underestimate the work which will be needed.”

Any effort to address quality must also be flexible, as the industry is evolving at a quick pace, with the introduction of new marketing and advertising technology still a regular occurrence. But the IAB and the Coalition for Better Ads are not the only ones taking on this issue.

In an attempt to further insert itself into the quality debate, market-leading ad blocking software AdBlock Plus recently launched a platform for serving whitelisted ads to users that initially included Google and AppNexus, who were to sell ad inventory. However, the two ad exchanges quickly distanced themselves from AdBlock Plus, pointing to ongoing industry acrimony toward ad blockers and calling into question whether the effort has strong enough legs to move forward.

With the IAB’s new ad formats currently going through a public discussion period and the Coalition for Better Ads just ramping up, advertisers eager to improve the user experience right now may feel at a loss over where to begin. One way could be to embrace IAB’s LEAN principles, which were introduced last year and address how to build ads that are non-invasive, light, encrypted and support consumers’ choice to not receive targeted ads.

But however the quality issue progresses from here, it’s clear that the time to act on the issue is sooner rather than later — when even more consumers may have adopted ad blocking software.

“Every consumer that installs an ad blocking app is going to be hard to persuade to let advertising back in,” GroupM’s Montgomery said.

Link to the original article from Marketing DIVE can be found here.

The coalition – which major brands like Google, Unilever and Procter & Gamble have helped form – has three main objectives, according to CEO of the World Federation of Advertisers Stephan Loerke. These are to create consumer-based and data-driven standards to improve the customer experience, develop and make use of technology to implement the standards effectively, and drive consumer and business awareness of the standards to facilitate useful engagement.

“The technology – created by the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Tech Lab – will score ads according to a number of criteria, such as page load time, format and size, with only those ads that meet a certain threshold or minimum standard able to appear on the sites of participating publishers,” Loerke noted at the announcement of the coalition at the Dmexco event in Cologne, Germany, in September. It’s expected that the scoring software will be released in 2017 both globally and in SA.

Josephine Buys, CEO of Interactive Advertising Bureau SA, recently attended AdWeek and the bureau’s MIXX Awards in the United States. She reports that there is an overwhelming sense in the US that, rather than wanting ads to be blocked, users just prefer ads that are relevant and of good quality and don’t interrupt their online conversation.

“It’s time to re-establish consumer trust by creating a better online user experience, in particular by rethinking online advertising to avoid an increase in the use of ad blocking software, though the take-up of such software is still quite low in SA,” says Buys.

A particular incentive for advertising companies and publishers to join the coalition, Loerke told Business Insider, is that it will connect them with marketers of the world’s major brands, all of whom are members of the World Federation of Advertisers and who account for approximately 90% of global advertising spend.

Significant and continued growth in the use of ad blocking means that advertisers, publishers and advertising technology companies will need to collaborate to ensure that the digital ads of the future are delivered in a way consumers want to engage with. “The new ad standards will be global and will help transform the current ad experience – which in many cases lets people down – to something that people welcome,” Loerke said.

In an interview with Marketing Week, Google’s director of product management, Scott Spencer, explained that the main aim of the coalition will be to understand the underlying causes of ad blocking and to use data to find out which aspects of the advertising consumers find frustrating.

“Consumers are just annoyed, and they are as likely to blame the publisher as the advertiser. This is not a problem that is purely a publisher issue, it is a challenge that affects the entire online ad industry,” he said.

Buys expects a positive response to the coalition in SA. “We fully expect all our member sectors – publishers, agencies, brands and advertising technology companies – to embrace the standards once they are set because the industry welcomes any solutions to avoid frustrating users, who are ultimately our prospective customers.”

Big take-out: The Coalition for Better Ads – which major brands like Google, Unilever and Procter & Gamble helped form – has been created to establish global digital advertising standards to improve the online consumer experience.

Link to the original article from The Red Zone on Financial Mail can be found here.

The world’s biggest advertisers and media owners have united for the first to form what is described as a ‘coalition for better ads’ at a time when scepticism over the efficacy of digital media is rife.

Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Google and Facebook are among the group’s founding members, alongside trade bodies such as the World Federation of Advertisers, IAB Europe and the American Association of Advertising Agencies. That a group such as this has a breadth of constituents is emblematic of the scale of apprehension around a medium that has many marketers questioning the returns they’re getting from it.

Consequently, the coalition is focused on establishing best practice guidelines on how to improve the advertising experience for users.

Procter & Gamble is the most prominent advertiser within the group to go public with these concerns after it claimed last month that efforts to push through more personalised ads on Facebook had backfired. Meanwhile, David Wheldon, chief marketing officer at RBS and the president of the WFA, told The Drum earlier this month that he expects his peers to ‘kick the tyres’ of what metrics should be used over the next 18 months.

The coalition will play a role in that investigation via several initiatives over the coming months that include:

• Create consumer-based, data-driven standards that companies in the online advertising industry can use to improve the consumer ad experience
• In conjunction with the IAB Tech Lab, develop and deploy technology to implement these standards
• Encourage awareness of the standards among consumers and businesses in order to ensure wide uptake and elicit feedback

Some of these projects will draw on the work its members have been doing on the issue of better measurability, including the efforts of the European national IABS to form a Charter on Digital Advertising Best Practice.

“The relationship between marketers and consumers is based on truth, results, trust and two-way communication,” said Thomas Benton, chief executive of DMA.

“As the Internet evolves, our industry must also evolve, and as a leader of the industry’s consumer preferences and self-regulatory programs for over 60 years – both of which are grounded in respecting consumers’ choices, DMA is pleased to expand its commitment in helping the industry keep pace with consumers’ expectations while continuing to foster the data and marketing innovation that delivers even greater value and benefits to consumers.”

The announcement affirms WPP chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell’s claim that advertisers are starting question whether they have “overinvested” in digital. While the medium continues to grow, marketers need more data and assurances over risks such as ad blocking, ad fraud and viewability before they start to plough more into the likes of publisher sites, Facebook and Google.

“When consumers have a negative experience with ads on a site, it impacts the entire Internet ecosystem – publishers, advertising technology companies, agencies, and advertisers,” said Leigh Freund, president and chief executive of Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) “Therefore, it is essential that our industry comes together to solve this problem in a structured way that puts the experience of the consumer front and center and holds the industry accountable for that experience.”

Link to the original article from The Drum can be found here.

The Cincinnati-based maker of brands such as Tide detergent and Crest toothpaste (NYSE: PG) joined with Google, rival consumer products company Unilever, advertising trade associations and others to create the coalition.

“We are part of the Coalition for Better Ads because there is room for the industry to improve the current consumer online advertising experience,” P&G spokeswoman Tressie Rose told me. “The coalition provides the opportunity for the industry to unite behind a common effort with the potential to drive change globally.”

The emergence of ad blockers is one indication that consumers aren’t pleased with online advertising, said Nancy Hill, CEO of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, which is also known as the 4A’s. About 26 percent of people who surf the web in the United States are expected to use ad blockers this year, up from 20 percent last year.

Advertising professionals and marketers need to look at themselves to understand why consumers aren’t responding to some types of ads and figure out how to correct the issue, Hill said in a statement released by the Coalition for Better Ads during the dmexco global conference for digital marketers in Cologne, Germany.

Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer for P&G, spoke out in June about“ad skipping, annoyingly long ad load times, endless ad streams and some really bad advertising.” He urged advertisers and ad agencies to raise the bar when it comes to creativity.

P&G claims to be the largest advertiser in the world, and the company is increasingly reliant on digital ads to reach consumers. About one-third of P&G’s U.S. marketing budget was spent on digital media such as online ads last year.

P&G spent $7.2 billion on advertising worldwide for continuing operations in the 2015-16 fiscal year, up slightly from $7.1 billion in the previous year. The company previously reported spending $8.3 billion on advertising in fiscal 2014-15, but that included charges related to P&G’s Beauty business that’s being divested to Coty Inc.