Since the digital migration, there has been an explosion of digital advertising options. Fortunately for publishers and now agencies, the simultaneous development of ad server technology allows us to feed back to our customers on multiple statistics pertaining to the advertising campaign. But with ad blocker technology on the rise, where do advertisers stand?
Intelligent ad server technologies
Ad server technology today means that advertising campaigns are holistically taken care of from placement to monitoring and calculating ROI. Most agencies use ad servers so that they get a transparent, immediate picture of the true value of their digital advertising campaign. Using an ad server not only allows us to get access to publisher reports, but also track your campaign results more accurately and better still figure out what works best, customer behaviour etc. The advertisers own and control all of the data which can be properly mined and used to improve the success of future campaigns.
Now that is all the good news however, having worked within the B2B technology sector for over 30 years, we know that our target personas, engineers, don’t like being targeted when researching online – we know first-hand they are actually angered by disruptive ads and are resistant to direct sales messages and so tracking the engineer with programmatic or retargeted ad campaigns, pop ups and page peals etc is likely to create a negative rather than a positive impact. Given the engineer persona, up and coming technologies such as ad blockers are likely to be more impactful in the engineering and manufacturing world than anywhere else.
The rise of ad blockers
Ad blockers – sometimes known as content blockers, are available for the Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer web browsers and Apple recently announced its iOS 9 operating system will now support the technology too.
Findlay Media - the UK's leading business media company for the manufacturing and engineering industry, recently revealed that nearly 20% of their online users access their portals either on a mobile or a tablet device with Apple users topping the list. In addition, almost one in seven British adults are currently using ad blocking technology, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) UK Ad Blocking Report conducted by YouGov and these figures are set to rise. Although these figures are not perceived as a major concern for the B2B market currently, in the long term if these ads are not replaced by rich content it can seriously affect publishers as they depend on online advertising revenues in order to operate. This also means that there will be no revenue to support independent editors that we need for PR campaigns, thus selling products overall is going to become a lot more complex.
What is the future?
Content, content and more content! Intelligent paid for content will be the only way around these technologies shaking up our industry. B2B PR agencies don’t have a problem delivering quality technical content, they do it all the time. As a result, however, this does mean in the future we will see advertising and PR teams work even closer together, which will have an even greater and positive outcome for businesses.
Another solution of course is Native advertising – or advertorials. Although they have been around for a while, Native ads are effective as they look, read, and appear as true content, they are also delivered by the publisher’s CMS system like all the editorial content thereby putting them beyond the reach of ad blocker technology.
As an agency, we are continually looking for opportunities from our media partners to best reach our B2B technology audience. With the latest technology shake-ups we’re experiencing, we’re certain that we’ll see publishers along with agencies experiment, test and learn with new innovative ideas to best meet these challenges and give the engineering community information the way that they want to consume it.
By Sylvia Laws, managing director at Technical Associates Group
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