A Letter to Marketers: Reduce your budget for online ads in 2017

Dear Marketers, You should not pay for online ads in 2017. Here’s why.

There are actually 500 million reasons why online ads are (rightfully) becoming an endangered species, but we’ll simplify things and give you 6 really good ones:

1-      Ad Block Plus, the world’s most popular ad blocking extension has been downloaded over 500 million times. And that’s counting only one of ad blocking tools available to consumers around the world.

2-      It is predicted that US$35 billion in ad revenue will be lost by 2020 globally because of ad blocking (Ovum). http://digiday.com/publishers/uh-oh-ad-blocking-forecast-cost-35-billion-2020/

3-      Usage of ad blockers grew by 41%  year on year 2014-2015 (PageFair, Adobe) https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/ad-blocking-stats#sm.00001ga4hdtfv4fmsusf4c2xy6g89

4-      There is a growing animosity towards pop-up ads among consumers; they find them intrusive or annoying or disruptive, or worse, all three.

5-      Online ads affect load time so consumers get impatient, immediately close the ads or move on to another ad-free source or site.

6-      Online ads are a valid cause for security concerns among consumers. So how can companies target and attract audience without the age-old comfort of paying for ads?

If not ads, then what?

Content. Great Content. Engaging Content.

Brands need to market through relevant, valuable and entertaining content.  Using content marketing tools and strategies, brands can engage, entertain and benefit their customer through carefully created and targeted content.

Brands need to talk around their products through their content and not push products at consumers. As a result, traditional marketing strategies need to be overhauled and content marketing must be integrated into brands’ online offering if they want to remain on top of their game and distinguish themselves from their competition.