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Aaron Worsham

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Are your Ads reaching all your visitors?

What does ABC, NBC, CBS, ESPN, Comedy Central, MSNBC, CNN and your website all have in common?  Well, they are all content providers who are fully or partially ad funded (I’m guessing you are too).  Oh, and you are all experiencing a viewer revolt over your advertisements.

Tivo and DVRs have made ad skipping within your TV shows commonplace.  The growing number of DVR users has forced networks into a scramble to find new ways to reach their viewers with targeted marketing.  Likewise, viewers online are using technology to ‘block’ ads from showing above, below, besides and within a site’s content.  While the number of people using ad blocking software is still small, little is standing in the way of massive adoption.

An ad blocker typically works by selectively ignoring requests within your sites HTML or JavaScript to contact a 3rd party and download an advertisement.  The software knows to ignore a request because someone has added it to a list, such as EasyList.  The method used by the software and its list is crude but effective.  Since most ads are served by 3rd party ad networks, the list need only identify the IP addresses or domains of major ad distributors to effectively block most of the ads on the web.  It is worth noting here that ads that fail to be downloaded also fail to register an impression, effecting your ad revenue directly.

While tools such as ad blockers have a head start in the race, sites are now ramping up their countermesures.  Knowing that they lose money by hosting ad-free content to visitors with ad-blocker, some sites are using a tool developed by hackers to identify ad blockers.  Once located, those visitors can be sent special messages requesting that they turn off the blocking on your site.  Some sites may even deny visitors with ad blockers access to their content.

One low-tech method to combat these ad blockers is to host ads within your own domain and from randomly generated urls.  This takes both the predicability and the top level location out of the equation for most ad blockers.  Still another suggestion, posted by the guy behind EasyList, is to create interstissile text ads within your content, much like what is done in the Radio industry as well as ad supported Podcasts.

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Paper Prototyping

Have you saved your paper sketches from that million-dollar idea you had while drinking at the bar?  You know, the one you wrote on the back of a napkin? It turns out that many web sites have had a paper phase.  Its actually a common theme that connects our humble web efforts with software projects throughout a quarter century.

Deeplinking has posted a short gallery of some early stage drafts of web sites you may be using today.

Included in their selection was this impressive video on how to interactively paper prototype.

This video is paper-based prototype for Daum’s web mail service, Hanmail.net made by Ajax.

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Google's AdPlanner

The New York Times is speculating [no longer speculation] that an announcement from Google at the Advertising Research Foundation meeting this week will unveil a new product called AdPlanner.  Details are understandably sketchy, though the NYT quotes an anonymous source on the product as saying it will help Ad Agencies to find demographics that match an ads target audience.

Valleywag, though, makes the logical connection by envisioning a tool that could eliminate the need for Ad Agencies all together.  If Google is successful and all the data that an Ad Agency needs is available through this tool, it could easily be rebranded for the direct market.   This is certainly within SOA for Google; they use technology to eliminate redundancy and establish direct, dependent markets.  Some of these efforts like AdSense, AdWords and GMail are clear winners.  Others, like Google’s little know newspaper and radio ad placement drive, are mired in the mud.

My personal opinion is that Google will succeed in creating a very useful tool that will in no way replace the unique talents and skills of Ad Placement Agencies.  This is going to raise the bar for Ad Agencies expectations on reporting and information within content networks which can only be a plus for the Ad Agency’s clients; business owners buying up online ad space.