Procter & Gamble Co. is helping launch the Coalition for Better Ads, which seeks to develop and implement global standards for online advertising.
The Cincinnati-based maker of brands such as Tide detergent and Crest toothpaste (NYSE: PG) joined with Google, rival consumer products company Unilever, advertising trade associations and others to create the coalition.
“We are part of the Coalition for Better Ads because there is room for the industry to improve the current consumer online advertising experience,” P&G spokeswoman Tressie Rose told me. “The coalition provides the opportunity for the industry to unite behind a common effort with the potential to drive change globally.”
The emergence of ad blockers is one indication that consumers aren’t pleased with online advertising, said Nancy Hill, CEO of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, which is also known as the 4A’s. About 26 percent of people who surf the web in the United States are expected to use ad blockers this year, up from 20 percent last year.
Advertising professionals and marketers need to look at themselves to understand why consumers aren’t responding to some types of ads and figure out how to correct the issue, Hill said in a statement released by the Coalition for Better Ads during the dmexco global conference for digital marketers in Cologne, Germany.
Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer for P&G, spoke out in June about“ad skipping, annoyingly long ad load times, endless ad streams and some really bad advertising.” He urged advertisers and ad agencies to raise the bar when it comes to creativity.
P&G claims to be the largest advertiser in the world, and the company is increasingly reliant on digital ads to reach consumers. About one-third of P&G’s U.S. marketing budget was spent on digital media such as online ads last year.
P&G spent $7.2 billion on advertising worldwide for continuing operations in the 2015-16 fiscal year, up slightly from $7.1 billion in the previous year. The company previously reported spending $8.3 billion on advertising in fiscal 2014-15, but that included charges related to P&G’s Beauty business that's being divested to Coty Inc.
Leigh Freund, CEO of Network Advertising Initiative, said that “when consumers have a negative experience with ads on a site, it impacts the entire internet ecosystem – publishers, advertising technology companies, agencies and advertisers.”
The coalition will focus on three initiatives in the coming months. It plans to create data-driven standards that companies in the online advertising industry can use to improve the consumer ad experience; develop and deploy technology to implement the standards; and encourage awareness of the standards among consumers and businesses to ensure wide uptake and elicit feedback.
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.