Dive Brief:
- AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong sees ad blocking tech as a challenge, but also believes AOL’s reliance on advertising puts it in a strong position to fight the damaging software.
- Ad blocking was a major topic of conversation at Advertising Week in New York, which wrapped up Thursday.
- Armstrong said ad-blocking was a threat because advertisers aren’t innovating enough on ad formats and failing to deliver value to consumers.
Dive Insight:
AOL's chief executive said during Ad Week both traditional display and video ads are a "space is just getting created for something to disrupt overall" and that right now ad-blocking tech is doing the disrupting.
Armstrong said, "Any threat that ad blocking is doing is because people aren't innovating enough on ad formats and delivering value to consumers. We may have created our own problem, but we're also in the single best position to invent our own way out of that problem."
He added the solution will be to have some company redefine what ads look like and how they are executed saying, “I hope that's our company, but somebody's going to do it. Ad blocking is a definitive signal to the industry that people need to get their butt into gear with innovation."
Although the actual figure has been disputed on statistical grounds, the 2015 Ad Blocking Report by PageFair and Adobe found ad blocking software has cost almost $22 billion in lost ad revenue so far in 2015 at the time of its release in early August. Ad-blocking has also been in the news with the release of iOS 9 and its ad-blocking capability for the mobile version of the Safari browser.