Remember the backlash good old Nick Clegg faced when he totally sold out on the Lib Dem manifesto and raised tuition fees as part of the coalition?

The sheer cheek of the situation is laughable with hindsight, though still leaves a bitter taste in the mouth for many.

Standing unquestionably for one thing to later become a turncoat can often have that effect on people.

With that in mind, I don’t suppose you noticed Adblocker Plus have started showing adverts on the websites you regularly visit? This is the extension you add to your internet browser specifically to block adverts. It’s pretty Ronseal.

A rather sizeable 22% of British adults have an ad blocker installed.

And that really shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Just look at your own behaviour when YouTube forces you to sit through an ad before that cat video you wanted to watch. Your mouse hovering over the ‘skip’ button, sweat beating down your brow as you have a staring match with the six second countdown.

We’ve always had a natural aversion to advertising, ad blockers are just the latest way of preventing the intrusion into your life.

Or were, should I say. Adblocker Plus are now placing ‘acceptable ads’ on sites you visit.

This is the criteria the ads need to meet:

• Acceptable ads are not annoying.
• Acceptable ads do not disrupt or distort the page content we’re trying to read.
• Acceptable ads are transparent with us about being an ad.
• Acceptable ads are effective without shouting at us.
• Acceptable ads are appropriate to the site that we are on.

This goes against the entire purpose of advertising.

In essence ‘acceptable ads’ need to be nice, inoffensive and entirely undisruptive. Clearly it isn’t just Adblocker Plus who believe this to be the case. You only need to turn on your TV to watch ad break after ad break of forgettable commercials.

Over £17bn a year is spent on advertising that is forgotten.

The purpose of advertising is simple. Be remembered.

Everything else is irrelevant. You’re doing this to stand out, not to be liked.

Yet 89% of advertising produced isn’t remembered.

And this pursuit of ‘acceptable’, tasteful advertising has resulted in a stream of identikit adverts across all channels. It’s justified advertising becoming a gateway to the film industry, where purpose and intelligence have been replaced by unrelated nicey-nice narratives building to logo reveals.

At The Mix we work with people from all over the country. A large chunk of it is understanding their perceptions of advertising and brand communication.

Time and time again the adverts they remember are the adverts our industry hates. They’re brash, annoying and entirely ‘unacceptable’ when measured against the Adblocker Plus criteria.

If they have the cheek to turn 180 and start showing us ads, Adblocker Plus may as well do away with their daft criteria, go the whole hog and embrace advertising in all its noisy, mustachioed, Meerkat-filled glory.

 

By Tash Walker, founder of The Mix London


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