Dive Brief:
- RBC Capital Markets and Advertising Age research on programmatic advertising found 78% of respondents stating ad block technology has a negative effect on the tactic, with 20% of the surveyed marketers saying the effect was “significantly negative.”
- Separate research from Cowen and Company on the same topic found U.S. senior ad buyers saw multi-device measurement as the biggest problem with programmatic at 57%, with fraud and ad blocking following at 47%.
- Ad blocking has been ongoing news in the digital ad industry, and most recently newly-departed FTC commissioner Julie Brill blamed the industry and its poor record of self-regulation as the main reason for the rise of ad blocking.
Dive Insight:
The impact of ad blocking technology on programmatic should concern marketers as well as ad buyers.
Programmatic display spending in the U.S. is expected to surpass $22 billion this year, according to eMarketer -- an amount that would account for 67% of total spending in the display ad category. And programmatic is trending upwards with forecasts that it will account for 72% of display spending next year at more than $27 billion.
Given that display ads are one of ad blocking tech’s main targets, combining a reliance on programmatic ad buys for display with an increase in ad blocking penetration (which almost all research indicates is the current trend) leads to a larger number of ads that never get served because the end user blocked them.
Beyond ad blocking, fraud is another issue facing programmatic. At least two programmatic platforms -- DataXu and TubeMogul – are directly addressing the problem by offering refunds when fraud reaches a certain threshold for an ad campaign.