To Block or Not to Block
I don’t think I’m the last person to have heard of Adblock, but judging by the amount of coverage I’ve been able to read about it today, I must be pretty close. In case you’re one of the few behind me on this one, Adblock is a plug-in available from Firefox that does, well, exactly what you’d expect something called Adblock to do. Which is interesting, but hardly surprising to anyone familiar with technology, advertising, or the kind of personality that is attracted to pushing the envelope in either field. It seems like there wasn’t a lot of lag time between the advent of pop-up ads before we were offered pop-up ad blockers. More recently, I’m remembering that within two months of launching the iPhone, a hacker found a way to bypass the device’s network restrictions. Technology not only challenges itself, but challenges other industries as well. And in the advertising industry, we’re generally up to the challenge.
Inherent in being creative and capturing attention is the ability to find new and unexpected ways to reach people. I have no doubt that as ad-blocking technology becomes more pervasive, our industry’s response will become more sophisticated. In fact, some of the groundwork is already being laid as marketers launch new ways of presenting themselves through user-generated content and social networking. With about 2.5 million Adblock users worldwide to date, we’ve got some time to prepare for this next wrinkle in the growth of online advertising. Until then, we can continue to read about Adblock and browse through all the Google ads for ad blockers that run adjacent to the articles.
Posted by Kelly on September 17th, 2007
Filed under Advertising, Marketing, Miscellaneous, Search Engine Marketing, Web | No Comments »
Leave a Reply