[Infowarrior] - Consumer Use Of Ad Blocking Technology Doubles

[Richard Forno]

Consumer Use Of Ad Blocking Technology Doubles

In the past two years, the number of consumers using pop-up blockers and
spam filters has more than doubled, according to a study from Forrester
Research.

By Thomas Claburn,  InformationWeek
Dec. 5, 2006
URL: 
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196601694

Memo to marketers: Consumers still hate you and they've taken to blocking
your ads.

In the past two years, the number of consumers using pop-up blockers and
spam filters has more than doubled, according to a new study, "Consumers
Love to Hate Advertising," from Forrester Research. More than half of all
American households now report using these ad blocking technologies to block
unwanted pitches.

Broadband households have become even harder to reach: some 81% of those
with high-speed Internet access employ pop-up blockers and spam filters.

Consumer attitudes toward marketers have actually improved somewhat,
according to the report. However, it's not clear whether this slight thaw in
sentiment is the result of successful ad blocking.

The report suggests that marketers, media agencies, and publishers should
see the stabilization of dislike as a sign of hope. At the same time, it
warns that companies "cannot afford to ignore consumer distaste for
advertising."

And that distaste is strong: "Only 13% of consumers admit that they buy
products because of their ads, and a paltry 6% believe that companies
generally tell the truth in ads," the report states.

The most common ad blocking system is run by the government-run National Do
Not Call Registry, which now protects over 107 million U.S. consumers from
intrusive telemarketing.

Forrester also notes that ad avoidance is becoming more common on
television. Today, 15% of consumers acknowledge using their digital video
recorders to skip ads, more than three times as many as in 2004. The
research firm predicts this behavior spread, based on projections that over
half of all U.S. households will have DVRs by 2010.

Consumer ire, the report says, is driven by three factors: an excess of ads,
the disruptive nature of ads, and the irrelevance of ads.

What's a marketer to do, beyond maintaining an unlisted number and
pretending to work in a less despised profession, such as a cigarette
company executive? Forrester recommends facilitating user experiences
instead of disrupting them; focusing on metrics that measure whether a
desired action occurred rather than whether a message was seen or heard; and
shifting budgets from media to infrastructure to facilitate marketing across
mediums from a central store of consumer data.

Copyright © 2006 CMP Media LLC