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Facebook's recent decision to block ad blocking on its desktop platform garnered a great deal of attention. On the whole, commentary has been remarkably balanced, though at least one article that appeared on LinkedIn seemed to take the position that Facebook has no business seeking to monetize its service.
The arguments about ad blocking are fully known at this point: Content providers have the right to monetize their offerings via
We cannot reasonably fault users for blocking ads when so much of the advertising they encounter online is premised on the idea that the ad matters more than anything else. Advertisers who aggressively force their ads on to consumers may see a short-term benefit, but in the long run these practices are detrimental to the advertising industry as a whole.
Stronger ways to build a brand
It is too much to hope that every company seeking to reach consumers online will employ practices that respect users' preferences and needs. However, that doesn't mean companies who do appreciate the importance of establishing and maintaining a positive brand position should simply throw up their hands and sink to the level of the worst offenders.
We are beginning to see some simple, good practices from the best content providers. Asking users to whitelist a site in order to access content is an effective strategy, one increasingly employed by the best brands in journalism. Ensuring ads don't block content is becoming increasingly common, particularly for video.
Working with ad-tech providers who are particularly good at finding the right consumers for a company's offerings such that consumers see ads for products and services they're actually interested in is, at this point, table stakes for any well-managed brand.
Relevance is foundational to good advertising, but the bottom line is that some people just hate advertising. Even those who don't object to advertising when it is relevant and does not degrade their online experiences employ ad blockers because those who push their messages aggressively still broadly populate the online landscape - and probably always will.
Defining a 'served impression'
Because this back-and-forth is perpetual, the question of whether a "served impression" was actually seen by the consumer is very important. This isn't about simple viewability of an impression, but whether an impression was indeed actually served. All the service providers have mechanisms for identifying false impressions and policies for making sure advertisers get the value they paid for.
At YuMe, our technology is capable of monitoring impressions to help advertisers pay only for an impression that does get served. Our technology is capable of detecting if a device is using an ad blocker and in such a case an ad would not be served. Therefore, potentially avoiding advertisers' data being polluted with false impressions and they are not charged for ads that were not viewable.
When a site calls our server for an ad, YuMe's Software Development Kit (SDK) comes into play. The YuMe SDK tells us many things about the device and its state. One of the things it is capable of detecting is whether an ad blocker is in use and whether an ad should be served. The intention is that an advertiser does not get a false impression in their data and would therefore not pay for a false impression either.
Not your father's embedded software
Let's get to know the brains behind our foundation in data, the YuMe SDK.
To the industry, it's a Software Development Kit, but the term doesn't begin to hint at the capabilities of the YuMe SDK, which is designed for video and ultimately delivering the right ad to the right audience on the right screen, in a brand-safe and viewable environment.
With its pre-bid technology capabilities, the SDK can go beyond detecting ad blockers and may provide the ability to support proactive, pre-optimized ad placements. After finding a high-quality placement based on several criteria, the SDK looks behind the impression to determine if the user is in the right audience segment. Using first-party audience data for targeting - rather than the traditional cookie-based audience targeting - makes a difference in multiscreen video-ad campaigns.
The back-and-forth pattern in ad blocking will not end soon. At the highest level, the ad-tech community needs to focus on being audience-first technology companies, not ad-solution du jour companies. We must focus on creating the most robust audiences possible.
This is our value to brands and content providers. When obstacles such as ad blocking arise, we must make sure brands are not penalized in their spend or in the data they receive. At YuMe, we are dedicated to solving this problem.
It's up to brands and content providers to continue to engage their consumers effectively. This means appreciating the underlying motivations for ad blocking and focusing on building audiences while serving ads in the right context, on the right device, when consumers are at their most receptive.
For more information on YuMe's approach to digital advertising, click here.
This post is sponsored by YuMe. Content written and provided by YuMe.
This article contains forward-looking statements, all statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements, including but not limited to, potential product developments and the reliability and methodologies for screening sites, are subject to risks and uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that could cause actual results and the timing of events to differ materially from future results that are expressed or implied in our forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements in this article are based on information available to YuMe as of the date hereof.
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