Consumer opinion is at the core of everything the Coalition for Better Ads does. It had been a while since we re-baselined our understanding of consumer opinion on digital ad experiences. So in 2023 we fielded quantitative and qualitative studies to understand:
The good news for the industry is that consumers largely understand and appreciate the crucial role that advertising plays in the digital economy. Attitudes towards online advertising are largely positive, especially among younger, more tech-savvy consumers who have grown up in an online world.
The research finds that the most cited reason for ad blocker usage is consumer frustration with annoying and disruptive ad experiences, reinforcing the important role that the Coalition and our Better Ads Standards play in addressing the issue. In the study, ad blocker users cited four categories of factors as reasons for adopting ad blockers, listed below:
For annoying ad experiences in particular, while we believe they represent a small subset of the ad experiences today, our research has shown that consumers become motivated to install an ad blocker after ongoing and repeated exposure to these experiences.
Be on the lookout for a series of posts diving deeper into these insights over the course of 2024.
What’s Next
The research insights inform the CBA’s priorities for 2024 and can also help trade bodies and individual companies build stronger relationships between consumers, ad supported publishers/platforms, and the digital advertising ecosystem that support them both.
Accordingly, the CBA plans to focus on two primary initiatives in 2024.