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by csydas 3640 days ago
Thank you for the response - I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted, so sorry for that.

The reason I asked on the benefit to the end-user is because a lot of what was listed about how ads have gotten better is very advertiser/content provider focused. Even relevancy seems more like a symptom of success for the advertiser rather than success for the user.

I am going to assume that I am an outlier case for many of your scenarios, as that's not really how I tend to search for things or decide what to purchase. For things like flights, I almost invariably use ITA Matrix to research and then purchase directly from the airlines, as having relied on site deals in the past either did not provide the promised discount amount or left me standing when the flight got oversold. In other instances, the ads led to a lot of contentless websites.

I guess I'm within the section that is very untrusting of advertisements. Past experience prior to my use of an adblocker left a bad taste in my mouth, and when I work on computers without an adblocker, even for ads that I don't find obtrusive past experience has just taught me to be reluctant. An over-active imagination and some knowledge of how computers work has likely left me in a very mistrusting state.

How would you propose, as an advertiser, to alleviate people in that state? This isn't exclusive to paranoid tech people like myself either (I am calling myself that, not putting words in your mouth), as when I did support for some time, my customers would constantly complain about advertisements, and the times that bad-ads got bad enough to actually infect the computer was enough to convince your average college student that an adblocker was essential. And I am not embellishing when I say "essential"; most wanted to know straight up what to use to keep ads gone.

If this is what you're battling, how do you think the industry should respond (or is?) in order to try to restore trust?

1 comments

We're not actually battling this issue, since technically it "works" for us. However, we do not know how much more uplift we potentially could get if we were to actively try to alleviate the mistrust & distaste for Ads, which i honestly do not know how we could. The only way i see it happening is by everyone in the Advertising industry to take quality seriously and try to make Ads as beneficial to both users and Advertisers alike. Unfortunately there are still plenty of money-farming Agencies out there who don't care because they get sent a large Advertising budget by a big client (ex: Nike or Volkswagen) with arbitrary goals like "bring us X more traffic or bring us X more sales) which isn't necessarily in either one's interest. The Agency just rakes in the money with minimum effort placed in the creation of the Ad (ironically, the image in the Ad is called a "Creative" when often times there is very little creativity used).