Ad Blocking vs. Mobile Blocking

Yes, So Very Sorry

For the past couple of weeks, AdLand has been awash in discussions about ad blockers. What was previously the province of a growing but tolerated number of techies is now mainstream behavior, ever since Apple supported the programs with their new platforms, and popular blockers have gone to the Droid system as well. With exceptional abuses like publishers producing 4X the memory bloat on trackers for cookies and ads as opposed to content, and data plans costing real money, it's easy to see why the apps are popular, despite the moral culpability. Besides, as the history of the music industry has shown, if you give people the technology to steal without any real threat of consequence, people will steal.

All of which has left me with one very small, and very out of touch and out of the demographic, question.

What is so wrong with the desktop and laptop experience that has made all of the traffic go to phones, anyway?

I understand, honestly, why some forms of content work better on mobile. If there is, well, Adult Utility going on, a screen that is more portable is clearly preferable. Certain dayparts are also going to be dominated by mobile. But what we're seeing from a data standpoint now is that it's not just the screen that is preferred in those hours, it's also the one that you use when you have the option to use something bigger, in the evening and weekends.

Why, especially when the mobile Web experience is so much worse than the desktop one, let alone something that puts you at risk for data issues that just don't exist on other platforms?

If you went to a print magazine and told them that they had to make a second version on much smaller stock, they just wouldn't do it. But everyone makes a mobile site.

Laptops are similar in real price (i.e., the lack of a contract) to smartphones, and dramatically less likely to be lost or dropped. They also let you type without the constant threat of error and/or auto-correct, and there's all kinds of extremely useful apps for those machines. Many of them with significantly less bugs and other issues. There's the nasty problem of people treating laptops as Work Only, and not wanting to put their personal browsing history on a machine that can be traced by an employer, but honestly. Having a second laptop isn't going to break the bank of most people.

There is, however, almost no sexiness in having the latest and greatest laptop. And that, really, is the crux of it, isn't it? Smartphones are stylish, customizable, and take away the point that people never really wanted -- the relentless literacy, since there's this big imposing keyboard that makes you type -- eww, words! -- and replaces it with an endless junk drawer of apps. Hoarding without the shame, on a screen no one will ever see but you.

If I were in charge of an upscale online publisher, I'd advertise my publication's full-size version -- aka, the actual Web site -- on my mobile site. I'd investigate having longer and better versions of my content that lived on full-sized hardware only. I'd put all of the cool Easter eggs that my content team could deliver on that site as well. Then, I'd price my ads to match the much better experience for full-sized viewing. I'd also try to put the ad-blocking software in place, again, for full-screen viewing only.

I'd also probably run the site into the ground in a month.

Which, judging from the hue and cry coming from online publishing over ad blocking, just means I'd get to the same place as everyone else. Just in less time.

But at least I'd have a dramatically better epitaph for that career.

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You're More Likely To... Insult Our Intelligence

Feel Teh Dumb

While I've been in marketing and advertising for over a generation, I've been pontificating about it in public as a content marketer (shh! I'm doing content marketing, kind of, right now!) for less than six months.

What I've learned most in that time? That there are some breathtakingly dumb, or at the very least, willfully ignorant, people who are also publishing about these very same subjects. This was manifest most plain in this little snippet in a treasure trove of dumb, in a column that I am not going to cite or link to because rewarding the dumb is against my ethics. The money quote from that is one that you are likely to see, or may have already. It's so dumb that we need to beat it down with sticks, and set it on fire, and then get serious. Here it is: you are more likely to survive a plane crash than click on a banner ad.

Now, I could talk about the branding benefit of display ads. I could talk about how A/B studies show rises in purchasing for prospect groups that have seen relevant display ads, or increased search engine traffic and email and direct mail conversion, and so on, and so on. I could talk about determining true response rates when you factor out bot traffic, or other forms of page view busting malfeasance. I could talk about viewability and above the fold points, or how click traffic on mobile can be a complete whiff because of user error. All of which is so obvious to everyone who runs display campaigns, and why they care more about viewability than click rate, because only utter freaking idiots care only about click rates. I could also ask about what kind of planes, what defines a crash, and where you get these sentiments, but I'm pretty sure we all know the neighborhood, seeing as we've all got one, and tend to need to cater to its needs on a routine basis.

But as this has been a clear and obvious point that adtech pros have been trying to make for the better part of a decade, I'm going to try a different tactic. Did you also know that you are more likely to help a  narwhale give birth, than buy a car from a single 30-second automobile ad? Clearly, no one should ever buy or make one of those. The odds of shifting your business computing systems from exposure to sponsorship at a golf tournament is the same as gargling with motor oil by mistake, and the odds of shifting your prescription heartburn medication from an OTC ad is the same as discovering a cure for male pattern idiocy.

Clicks on banners are nice, if you are placing the ad campaign. Sales as part of a coordinated media campaign, with lifts in your other channels coming from the branding and awareness benefit that a viewed and relevant campaign can provide, is what you are actually trying to accomplish.

But so long as we are, you know, slandering a marketing and advertising channel for things that aren't very important, as if they were the be-all and end-all of their existence...

Well, why be so limited as to stick to tried and true nonsense, when there's a whole world of brand new nonsense to explore?

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Four Marketing and Advertising devices that are actually doomed

Buh Bye

One of the stocks in trade for the folks who work at M&AD is to make fun of clickbait columnists who want to declare a marketing or advertising medium to be Dead. Look around, and you can find people sticking a fork in just about anything that employs pros, from email to display to SEO to individual consumer categories, and so on, and so on. If you are first to declare something Dead, you win!

It's hackery, but it gets clicks and views, so the best you can do is make fun of them and move on.

However, there *are* business models that are closer to this mortal coil than others. And at the risk of belaboring the obvious, here's the ones that we see as not being around in another generation or less.

1) The (printed) Yellow Pages

If you are anything like me, you are kind of amazed this is still around in the first place, since the only thing you've done with it for 15 years is move the book from your doostep to your recycling bin, since there is this thing called the Internet, all while wondering why you haven't called to opt out of delivery in the first place. My children don't even know what this is, and in a world with ubiquitous communication via the Internet, a total market coverage device that's outdated the day its printed just doesn't make any sense.

I get that there are probably direct marketing pros with coupons and spreadsheets that show this is still a winning play and purchase. That math is getting worse every week and every month, and there's no reason to think that trend will stop.

2) Outbound Telemarketing

In retrospect, it's amazing that this ever was an industry, given how disruptive and disagreeable a cold-call can be. While the phone will still be a prime tool for reaching targeted lists and CRM work, the days of trying to reach new customers with little more than a number are going to be blocked and trucked out of existence, even to the point of robo-calling getting the heave ho. No one, other than the people who made a frightening amount of money on it over the years, will mourn its demise.

3) DRTV

This is one of those formats that may be hard for elites to imagine still exists, but remnant broadcast inventory is cheap, and it really does not take much in the way of conversions to make the math work. The problem is that broadcast viewership numbers are just crashing against the Web, especially for youth demographics that make up a sweet spot for many of the products offered. At some point, production costs have to make even the remnant buy a poor purchase, especially when the remnant audience is getting smaller and smaller.

4) TMC Mailers

Unlike many digital pros, I don't believe that all direct mail will go away; there's just too much value in print for establishing brand credibility and integrity. But I do believe that elements of direct mail are doomed, and the foremost among them is the most unwanted. That would be the Total Market Coverage piece, with bundled flyers from your local grocery stores and pharmacies, that's been littering your mail box since, well, forever.

The problem with the TMC is, like the other pieces on this list, is that there is little branding benefit, and spreadsheets that are just going to point in the wrong direction until there is just no reason for it to continue. Beyond the environmental issues, the plain and simple is that some people in a neighborhood are never going to become customers of the stores that have been hitting their mailboxes every week. If you can pull out those dead addresses -- and with the Internet of Things, you will -- there is no reason for these mailers to exist.

You'll still get flyers, but only for the places that make sense. And only the print shops and mail carriers that are going to see less billing will mind.

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Please like or share this column, connect with me on LinkedIn, or email me at davidlmountain at gmail dot com, or hit the agency boxes at top right. RFPs are always free, and we hope to hear from you soon.