Publisher’s Next 30 days: What to do about the Chrome Ad Blocker Release Feburary 15 2018

By Elisa Rivero

At ResponsiveAds our mission is to make it fast and easy to produce awesome creative that users want.  How do you do that in a world where ad blockers are becoming mainstream. As the free web has been built by a business model of advertising, sponsored and marketing content it is hard to believe that all of the ad business with just evaporate when the industry is seeing YoY growth in digital spends and the transition of offline traditional media dollars to digital.

On Feb 15th,  With Google’s own ad blocker in Chrome, they plan to eliminate the need for users to install other ad blockers with a solution to the “bad” ad problem.  As one of the largest advertising companies, it is in their best interest to deliver a solution that works.  Between Google and Facebook alone a majority of the digital media dollar spend is through their networks.

The promise with this new ad blocker is to follow the standards laid out by the CBA “ Coalition of Better Advertising”  The spec can be found here at https://www.betterads.org/standards/.

The key messages we find for Publishers is to follow these three common-sense principles:

1. Limit anything that animates, moves or plays video.  With sound, it must be muted with to user-initiated trigger only.
2. Eliminate anything that covers the content.  This conversation is good for websites and your applications (e.g mobile iOS or Android apps)
3. Work with ad tech companies that prioritize load performance and high-quality creative
4. Less-is-more approach by developing a few high earning positions, instead of as many small multiple square ad slots all over the page that gives ad clutter.

As a first of many posts to come,  Here is a quick summary of three starting options we have available for your digital responsive ads:

[1] Employ Responsive Native and Flexible Formats: Develop and work with better ad formats that fit-more natively on the page and the content.  Native Ads have been a success, but we believe they can be taken to a much more rich, dynamic, immersive and interactive level with creative delivered from tools such as ResponsiveAds Narrator™ Studio.   We believe to get the fastest loads and the best performance it is imperative to keep ad sizes under 200K

[2] Better Placement Strategies:  As you must kill your Pop-ups or ads that cover the content, develop strategies such as these positions.

• Top Edge-to-Edge Responsive Expandables:  These are your most premium positions when the prestitial and interstials must be eliminated.
  • 1×1 placement in the top header of the content.  The ad can push down to a nice height ( from 300~600H) for high-impact with a certain frequency cap for users, and then close-up (66~90H) or disappear.
  • Top 970×250 IAB Slot to have similar expandables that can go edge-to-edge or even just and edge-to-edge Responsive banner
• Develop edge-to-edge placements: In the top and middle leader placements with Page-Scrollers™, Edge-to-edge parallax units and also dynamic expandables
• Immersive First: Leverage solutions such as carousel galleries, engaging gamified content or highly immersive creative approaches that bring some value to the end-user.  The ResponsiveAds platform enables designers to embed anything they want as long as the loads are light.  When deploying video units assure that there is a progressive delivery system to optimize the performance of the video.

[3] Scrutinize the animation and develop rich-engaging creative:  When building out ads with animation, we have found that subtle animation that flows for only several seconds is better than the 5~10 sec animated banners. The attention span of the user scrolling down the page in many cases is even less than 2 seconds unless they are reading an article and the ad is a companion.  Even if this is the case, you never want to interrupt the user, but bring value to your readers with engaging strategies.

As there are only 30 days left till the Chrome Ad Blocker update with hit millions of users.   Time is now to get this right.

Happy Planning….