The topic of ad blocking has hit the main stream after a recent Apple iOS update began supporting it. As users embrace the option of skipping over advertisements and blocking them from their view, marketers are prompted to step up to the challenge.

 

Ad blocking has grown to cost the industry roughly $781 million a year – yikes. Big numbers. Luckily for some advertisers, they have found a way to use it to their advantage. Utilizing the feature on YouTube that allows users to skip an ad after 5 seconds, GEICO created a simple ad that only lasted this long. The campaign behind the ad: “You can’t skip this GEICO ad, because it’s already over.”

 

 

The Facebook advertising world also has a unique feature—auto play for videos. Hotels.com incorporated this into an ad and specifically designed it to run without sound, allowing user experiences to remain uninterrupted (for the most part).

 

As these pesky ad blockers continue to make their mark, marketers need to create ads that, as this Forbes article so aptly put it, “match the context of the site or app in which they appear.” Consumers don’t like to be interrupted, and ad blockers were created as a way out. That being said, there are ways that marketers can adapt to this new landscape in order to keep their ads from being blocked. Here’s our advice:

 

Be simple

The main reason that consumers dislike online advertisements is that they don’t like being interrupted. Pop-up ads block content and follow users through their web surfing experience. Marketers can avoid this by creating content that is simple and relevant to the user experience, limiting the disruptions and the all-too-frequent irrelevance.

Boost ads through social media

While ad blockers are designed to remove ads from the online experience, most social media channels remain peppered with ads. Ads displayed via Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter fit effortlessly into the platforms and are made an innocuous – though present – part of the user’s experience.

 

As ad blocking is relatively new, it is also relatively unrefined. To date, the feature is used to block out any and all advertising content. However, as the story goes, there is always room for improvement. And fingers crossed there’s room for us as ad-people, too.