Ad blocking has become a serious obstacle for digital advertising, and advertisers, agencies, advertising technology companies and publishers have come together to form the Coalition for Better Ads to create global digital advertising standards in the hope of countering ads that frustrate consumers.

The coalition – which major brands like Google, Unilever and Procter & Gamble have helped form – has three main objectives, according to CEO of the World Federation of Advertisers Stephan Loerke. These are to create consumer-based and data-driven standards to improve the customer experience, develop and make use of technology to implement the standards effectively, and drive consumer and business awareness of the standards to facilitate useful engagement.

“The technology – created by the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Tech Lab – will score ads according to a number of criteria, such as page load time, format and size, with only those ads that meet a certain threshold or minimum standard able to appear on the sites of participating publishers,” Loerke noted at the announcement of the coalition at the Dmexco event in Cologne, Germany, in September. It’s expected that the scoring software will be released in 2017 both globally and in SA.

Josephine Buys, CEO of Interactive Advertising Bureau SA, recently attended AdWeek and the bureau’s MIXX Awards in the United States. She reports that there is an overwhelming sense in the US that, rather than wanting ads to be blocked, users just prefer ads that are relevant and of good quality and don’t interrupt their online conversation.

“It’s time to re-establish consumer trust by creating a better online user experience, in particular by rethinking online advertising to avoid an increase in the use of ad blocking software, though the take-up of such software is still quite low in SA,” says Buys.

A particular incentive for advertising companies and publishers to join the coalition, Loerke told Business Insider, is that it will connect them with marketers of the world’s major brands, all of whom are members of the World Federation of Advertisers and who account for approximately 90% of global advertising spend.

Significant and continued growth in the use of ad blocking means that advertisers, publishers and advertising technology companies will need to collaborate to ensure that the digital ads of the future are delivered in a way consumers want to engage with. “The new ad standards will be global and will help transform the current ad experience – which in many cases lets people down – to something that people welcome,” Loerke said.

In an interview with Marketing Week, Google’s director of product management, Scott Spencer, explained that the main aim of the coalition will be to understand the underlying causes of ad blocking and to use data to find out which aspects of the advertising consumers find frustrating.

“Consumers are just annoyed, and they are as likely to blame the publisher as the advertiser. This is not a problem that is purely a publisher issue, it is a challenge that affects the entire online ad industry,” he said.

Buys expects a positive response to the coalition in SA. “We fully expect all our member sectors – publishers, agencies, brands and advertising technology companies – to embrace the standards once they are set because the industry welcomes any solutions to avoid frustrating users, who are ultimately our prospective customers.”

Big take-out: The Coalition for Better Ads – which major brands like Google, Unilever and Procter & Gamble helped form – has been created to establish global digital advertising standards to improve the online consumer experience.

Link to the original article from The Red Zone on Financial Mail can be found here.