100% Audience Access, Income and Insight

There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what ad blockers do, and about what their real impact is. Several different strategies have emerged to deal with ad blockers, from outright access blocking to gentle consumer petitioning. Yet there is only one genuinely successful way to deal with ad blockers - which is to serve up properly vetted ads natively.

I talk of ’properly vetted ads’ as the downside of programmatic advertising is the lack of significant validation - which means likely exposure to quite dodgy and even dangerous malvertisements. It’s not just a case of being able to serve ads to all, but also being able to track and analyse your audience in situ. The much-used Google DoubleClick and Analytics are utilities that are very easily and immediately disabled by ad blockers, so you neither really know your audience nor benefit from it fully.

Nearly all programmatic advertising solutions rely on some form of 3rd party / non-native technology. And ad blockers are getting ever more clever in identifying ad sources and suspending them. To such an extent that we at Affino have had to come up with clever counter-measures of our own, such that our platform’s natively displayed ads mask any likely advertising characteristics - including naming and file structure. We ongoingly have to make ads appear systematically indistinct from core content - something that is really only possible with a fully integral and holistic digital business solution.

Publications like City A.M. have a solution to simply block the blockers - which they say works for them. A resource I used to use a lot until recently tried to do the same to me - AllMusic.com - access restrictions demanding you suspend your privacy protector / ad blocker. I momentarily suspended mine for AllMusic, but then saw the number of on-site trackers ramp up to more than 40 on a single page, so I quickly switched my blocking on again, and now simply avoid that site. I would have no issue paying some sort of subscription for access, but I’m not going to subject myself to more than 40 shady 3rd party cookie trackers and services and the potentially thousands of potentially risky advertisers - posing significant threats to my personal security and identity.

At Affino, we believe the ad blocking topic is very much one of education and illumination - showing businesses how much they are impacted by ad blockers, and what proportion of their audience they are not getting full value from. To those ends we will soon be launching a free ’Audience Gap Tracking’ service - a JavaScript tracker which show exactly what you might be losing out on, and how much you could gain by adopting a single-source solution like Affino - which grants you 100% Audience Access, Full Income and Total Insight.