Recently read this story about Ad Blocking and thought I needed to share.

Here is a link to it in Ad Age…but in case you can’t get to the article, I’ve included it below.   This seems very real and very within reach.  It’s akin to the radar detector…technology builds platforms to find police traps.  Police use technology to outsmart consumer technology…and the spiral starts and continues.

Problem here is, if marketers find ways to unblock the blockers, consumers are likely to find some other home where they don’t have to be subject to ads.

Might mean new revenue models for content providers are needed.  Might mean marketers need to find new ways to communicate via the net.

For you…it means you need to find out how your agency is thinking about this.  Are they staying on top of these and other trends to keep you ahead of the goings-on in the digital and social space?

Will be interesting indeed!

Here is the article:

By Ana Radelat. Published on September 08, 2015 in Ad Age.

The nation’s largest advertisers are seeking solutions, technical and otherwise, to combat a new threat to the Internet, a growing movement to block their ads.

Dan Jaffe, the top lobbyist for the Association of National Advertisers, said it’s a delicate situation that calls for a carefully thought out solution. That isn’t within reach yet – even as ad blocking has erupted as a major problem.

Up to now, publishers have been the most worried about tools that strip their sites of ads, but among marketers, “concerns are growing,” Mr. Jaffe said.

Mr. Jaffe said advertisers are thinking about fighting back against blocking software with rival technology that “blocks the blockers and gets around the blockers.”

Some media companies have already tried this: CBS.com has prevented blockers from eliminating ads when streaming episodes of their shows.

But there could be a downside if advertisers adopt this tactic.

“We don’t want to anger consumers,” Mr. Jaffe said. “Everybody needs to move carefully.”

To Mr. Jaffe, dislike of advertising isn’t the reason people, especially millennials, are installing ad blockers on their devices.

Long initial page-load time and concerns about privacy are also driving and ad-blocking rage. These issues could be addressed, he said.

Advertisers cite a study conducted by Pagefair, a company that helps publishers defeat ad blockers, that says nearly $22 billion has been lost through anti-advertising technology.

Mr. Jaffe says the ad blocking movement has the potential to “threaten the economic viability of the media” and push more and more content behind firewalls. The world could become split into information-haves and information-have nots who can’t afford to pay or are unwilling to pay for the information and entertainment that’s now free, thanks to advertising, he said.

“Potentially, this could change the whole economic structure of the internet,” he said.