The rise of digital display advertising has led to many print budgets being slashed, but now it’s under pressure from another digital threat – ad blocking. “Gatvol” of a deluge of banner ads on basically every website, consumers have turned to installing ad blocking extensions to browse ad-free. And the browsers don’t mind complying, with Google rolling out its own ad blocker on Chrome, and Opera doing the same. Locally, only 13% of South Africans use ad blockers, roughly half the number of those doing so internationally. With the Facebook data-sharing fiasco doing much to create a distinct lack of trust in those pulling the marketing strings, this is only set to rise. In fact, Juniper Research points out that publishers could lose as much as US$27bn in revenue by 2020 due to ad blockers – close to 10% of total digital advertising market spend. Marketers are waking up to the fact that throwing a whole bunch of money into digital display advertising just does not work. With the digit...
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