Hasta La Creative!

Move over Adsense, there’s a new kid in town. Adblock Plus has launched a service that replaces ads, the “bad ads”, on any given internet property with “acceptable ads”. We’ve all known that Adblock could do this since they opened up ad space for Amnesty on the World Day Against Cyber Censorship, which got a lot of attention.

Adblock Plus has been running an Acceptable Ads program since 2011, and now there’s a marketplace open where publishers to pick which ads are deemed “acceptable”. The program was fairly limited before as both publishers and ad networks need to specifically work with and pay Adblock Plus to deem some ads acceptable. With the marketplace opening it will now be far easier for publishers to display acceptable ads, as all they have to do is sign up, plug some third party code in their website, and whitelisted ads will run.

Publishers may find this very useful, it’s always been near impossible to remove ads from being displayed on ones website if you use Adsense. Publishers have long been complaining that they can not remove scientology ads, for example, even if they deem these ads a poor fit for their own publication. There’s also been issues with Adsense showing violent porn ads on regular news sites.

This program from Adblock Plus is publisher friendly, stepping in to give a publisher more control in an area where they previously had none. The biggest weakness of Adsense was the chore of attempting to filter out ads deemed inappropriate for ones publication. The biggest eyesore for the readers was being targeted by ads irrelevant to the publication they’re reading and their interests.

Publishers will get to keep 80 percent of all ad revenue from marketplace ads, the remaining 20 go to the parties serving the ads, and Adblock Plus will receive 6 percent of total revenue.

Ben Williams, Adblock Plus’ operations and communications director tells the Verge that this was inevitable.
“Ad blocking would have happened with our without us. What we were able to do is try and reverse the spread of 100 percent black-and-white ad blocking, blocking everything … Acceptable ads was a pivot toward what we think is better.”

Readers do not want to disable their adbock, not because ads are terrible but because of security issues. On sites like Forbes and The Economist it may even get your computer infected with malware if you don’t have Adblock on. The banner ad evil twin who carries clickjacking ransomware is not a new phenomenon, Doubleclick distributed malware in 2010 and I’ve been preaching to the converted here on Adland since the early 2000s that ad networks need to be better policed or the publishers suffer when blocking becomes standard. Welcome to the future I predicted.

There are those that feel Adblock placing themselves in between networks and publishers have “muscled in” on a territory previously their alone. At TechCrunch Disrupt Randall Rothenberg, the head of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, refused to shake hands with Eyeo CEO Till Faida, the maker of AdBlock Plus. Malware is a problem that the internet can not ignore, and Brave browser is just like adblock, seeking to protect peoples devices from hijacking, while in the future cutting themselves a slice of that ad revenue. I can’t wait for the hero that gives the content creators and publishers the largest slice of that pie appears – without content there’s nothing to advertise on. Publishers may be unhappy with the acceptable ads program as it likely limits what a site can earn, the “acceptable ads” may not be the highest income generating ads. But without the program there would be no ads, and no revenue from ads, at all.

The Adblock Plus acceptable ads ad marketplace is launching in beta today, with full rollout later this year. Adblock Plus is also setting up a committee of publishers, privacy advocates, and advertisers to figure out the future of what its Acceptable Ad guidelines should look like.

If publishers are initially resistant to this idea, it will be nothing compared to Adblock Plus users. Adblock need to take care not to become the villain of the story here, hated by both the interactive advertising giants, and the readers who opted out from ads completely. In the end this is about control, and who has it. It should always be the individual who can care for their devices as they see fit.

WSJ has an interesting quote:

Eyeo declined to disclose which companies are on its “whitelist”—those that escape ad-blocking. According to a person familiar with the company’s business relationships, paying customers of Eyeo include Google, Microsoft Corp. and Taboola.

Taboola and Google ads are usually what users are trying to avoid. I have a better system, I refuse to read any publication that has Taboola ads, as I see those ads as a “quality mark” of the publication itself. Taboola ads indicate poor journalistic quality.

The new Maltesers campaigns were made as a response to Channel 4’s “Superhumans Wanted.” The Channel 4 initiative gave away £1m of its commercial air time to help improve representation of disability in TV advertising will air during the Paralympic Games Opening Ceremony on Channel 4 on Wednesday 7th September from 9pm. Mars and AMV BBDO created these ads for Maltesers, which fit right in their current campaign quite naturally and carry on the usual “gossip break” without missing a beat, the only difference being that the stories are told by disabled people. They still look “On the light side of life”, even if the entire story here is told in sign language. The first ever “deaf” commercial that was aired during the super bowl was Pepsi – Bobs House in 2008, but this is still one of the first sign language only ads.

Cat Collins, strategy partner at AMV BBDO, explained in a statement: “Rather than creating distance by putting disabled people on a pedestal, we believed we could achieve more by showing disabled people simply as … people. For Maltesers, that meant seeking out the hilarious stories from their lives that they look on the light side of, just as the characters in the rest of our campaign do. It meant using a powerful weapon to break down discomfort, division and prejudice — a good laugh.”

This story, which I am sure has happened to someone, tells about a naughty dog who eats a hearing aid. And what the owner said in response.

A classic “attack ad” has just been released by the Trump campaign, using Hillary Clinton’s own words against her. This move isn’t all that unusual in a political ad standoff, they
have simply taken the soundbite from Hillary Clinton’s speech at a recent fundraiser and juxtaposed it with images from … Oh… From the 2016 GOP Convention in Cleveland, Ohio. While that may look like they’re preaching to the converted, they’re showing the TV viewers the people who are already committed to Trump. People who look just like regular people, you, me, your neighbour, your grandmother. To end the images we also see Trump and Pence helping deliver food to those hit by the recent devastating flooding in Louisiana, what a deplorable thing to do. It remains to be seen if this tactic will work.

HILLARY CLINTON: “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘Basket of Deplorables. The racists, sexists, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, you name it.”

“’Deplorable’ is a response to the incredibly offensive comments Hillary Clinton made last Friday in front of reporters and her wealthy donor friends, and serves as a call to action for the tens of millions of hard working Americans she viciously demonized – to stand united against the Clinton-led rigged Washington system. These highly offensive and divisive comments reveal the contempt and disgust for everyday Americans that Hillary Clinton has hoped to hide by avoiding the press and running the least-transparent campaign in modern political history.” Jason Miller, Senior Communications Advisor