Where the revolution started!
Consumer Use Of Ad-Blocking Technology Doubles
Memo to marketers: Consumers still hate you, and they’ve taken to blocking your ads.
In the past two years, the number of consumers using pop-up blockers and spam filters has more than doubled, according to a new study, “Consumers Love to Hate Advertising,” from Forrester Research. More than half of all American households now report using these ad-blocking technologies to block unwanted pitches.
Broadband households have become even harder to reach: Some 81% of those with high-speed Internet access employ pop-up blockers and spam filters.
Consumer attitudes toward marketers have actually improved somewhat, according to the report. But it’s not clear whether this slight thaw in sentiment is the result of successful ad blocking.
The report suggests that marketers, media agencies, and publishers should see the stabilization of dislike as a sign of hope. At the same time, it warns that companies “cannot afford to ignore consumer distaste for advertising.”
And that distaste is strong. “Only 13% of consumers admit that they buy products because of their ads, and a paltry 6% believe that companies generally tell the truth in ads,” the report states.
The most common ad-blocking system is operated by the government-run National Do Not Call Registry, which now protects over 107 million U.S. consumers from intrusive telemarketing.
Forrester also notes that ad avoidance is becoming more common on television. Today, 15% of consumers acknowledge using their digital video recorders to skip ads, more than three times as many as in 2004. The research firm predicts this behavior will spread, based on projections that over half of all U.S. households will have DVRs by 2010.
Consumer ire, the report says, is driven by three factors: an excess of ads, the disruptive nature of ads, and the irrelevance of ads.
What’s a marketer to do, beyond maintaining an unlisted number and pretending to work in a less despised profession such as a cigarette company executive? Forrester recommends facilitating user experiences instead of disrupting them; focusing on metrics that measure whether a desired action occurred rather than whether a message was seen or heard; and shifting budgets from media to infrastructure to facilitate marketing across mediums from a central store of consumer data.
The SPAM and pop-ups really harm the casual computer user or business user who has little or no computer savvy.
I worked on a machine for a friend who used the computer primarily for business, payroll and receivables. But the computer was also used to surf the Internet. When I got the machine to my shop, I was dumfounded.
Between the anti-virus scans and ad-remover scans, over 1000 items were removed from the machine. Despite all that, I was never able to completely restore the computer to normal. Any use of IE caused a flood of pop-ups, despite the fact that Ad-Aware and Spybot both said the machine was clean. I installed FireFox so they could continue to use the computer. Eventually they brought it back and I had to reformat the computer.
This friend lost the use of his business computer on two occasions while I had it in my shop. I spent a considerable amount of time cleaning and then restoring the computer to normal. I did the work for free, but think of how many times this happens, and how much money is spent because of spam and pop-ups.
When you get bombarded with annoying ads on TV or radio you can change the channel and no harm is done. Not the case with computer adware, spyware, viruses, etc.
This friend was unaware of the dangers of casual web surfing and did not understand the need for anti-virus. But isn’t this pretty much the norm for the average computer user? He and his staff are smarter now, but I know that machine will be back in my shop some day for another housecleaning!