The Coalition for Better Ads, which was founded last year by Procter & Gamble Co. and other major players in the industry, today recommended standards aimed at curbing pop-ups and other forms of internet advertising that annoy people using desktop or mobile computers.

The Cincinnati-based maker of products such as Pampers diapers (NYSE: PG) is the largest advertiser in the world, and the company is increasingly reliant on digital ads to inform consumers about its brands.

About one-third of P&G’s $7.2 billion advertising budget is geared to digital mediums. U.S. marketers alone are now logging $200 billion annually in ad spend, including $72 billion on digital advertising.

But ad-blocking software that a growing number of people are installing on their computers poses a challenge, according to P&G and other members of the coalition. About 26 percent of people who surf the web in the United States were estimated to use ad blockers in 2016, up from 20 percent the previous year.

“At P&G, we support an open and free online environment where people have choice and advertisers are able to reach them in the most preferred ways,” P&G spokeswoman Tressie Rose told me. “While these are voluntary guidelines, we hope the industry comes together to implement the recommendations so we can all better serve people in an online and mobile world.”

The coalition’s initial Better Ads Standards were introduced March 22 based on consumer advertising preferences that were determined by surveying more than 25,000 people in North America and Europe, who rated 104 web ad experiences.

During the coalition’s research, consumers were asked to read articles on simulated content pages and then rate different ad experiences.

Along with pop-up ads, which block the main content of a webpage, the consumer preference ratings identified the following types of experiences as failing to meet the Better Ads Standard for desktop computer viewing: auto-play video ads with sound, prestitial ads with countdown (which force a reader to wait for a certain number of seconds before an ad either can be skipped or closes on its own) and large sticky ads (which adhere to a side of a mobile page and block part of the view regardless of scrolling by the reader).

For mobile web viewing, consumers frowned on: pop-up ads, prestitial ads, poststitial ads with countdown (which appear after the viewer follows a link and require waiting for a certain number of seconds before an ad can be skipped or it closes on its own), ads with density greater than 30 percent, flashing animated ads, auto-play video ads with sound, full-screen scroll-over ads, and large sticky ads.

“We hope these initial standards will be a wake-up call to brands, retailers, agencies, publishers and their technology suppliers – and that they will retire the ad formats that research proves annoy and abuse consumers,” said Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. “If they don’t, ad blocking will rise, advertising will decline, and the marketplace of ideas and information that supports open societies and liberal economies will slide into oblivion.”

Marc Pritchard, chief brand-building officer for P&G, spoke out last year about “ad skipping, annoyingly long ad load times, endless ad streams and some really bad advertising.”

To create the coalition, P&G joined with rival consumer products company Unilever as well as Facebook, Google, advertising trade associations such as the IAB, and others.

“We are energized by how quickly this cross-industry coalition was able to research and identify annoying advertising formats,” said Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next. “There is still much work to be done, but we are out of the gate in our work to make the web less annoying for the average consumer.”

Other founding members of the coalition include the Association of National Advertisers, the World Federation of Advertisers, the Washington Post, the News Media Alliance, the European Publishers Council, BVDW Germany, DMA, GroupM, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, IAB Europe and IAB Tech Lab.

Link to the original article from Cincinnati Business Courier can be found here.