Ad-Blocking- Marketing's Growing Issue

Advertising week is kicking off tomorrow morning, when the biggest names in the advertising industry will be congregating in New York to discuss the latest and biggest trends of the business. Currently, the online ad-industry is almost sixty billion dollars a year, and is expected to grow another 17% in the next year. A recent problem that many of these advertisers have been facing is ad-blocking. Because of the thousands of pitches, products, and brands placed in front of consumers every single day, people are beginning to sicken of the entire process. Because of this, ad-free streaming and ad-blocking have increased in popularity over the past year or so. Marketers are also worried about the possibility of piracy and the assurance that their ads are actually being viewed on the websites they put them on. 

Thousands of marketing, tech, and media executives will be meeting at the twelfth annual conference in which companies like Facebook, Google, Apple, and Twitter will be releasing some of their new advertising products and services. Facebook will also be showing how Instagram is an effective tool to market products. Hundreds of millions of people are on these internet tools every day, and companies such as Nike, General Electric, and Bank of America need to find the most effective way to spend their money to reach the largest amount of people possible. However, it is not only about reaching the largest amount of people; it is also about the image of the advertisement sticking in the consumer’s mind. To draw in the customer, an advertisement’s placement is crucial, as well as the color in relation to rest of the page, and even the font. Unfortunately for many companies looking to advertise on the internet, people are blocking ads and companies developing ad-blocking software that could accelerate the end of the advertising age.

Of course, there is no such thing as free. Facebook is free of charge because their benefit is your information. They trade this information to advertisers for profit. While we believe that Google, Twitter, and Facebook are free internet outlets, really they are the intermediary between us and the company that wants to sell us their product. When peoples’ information is no longer rendered useful, many internet sites are going to fall out of the profit range and may have to start charging for access at some point. Of course, the business is currently a sixty billion dollar industry; as such we are far away from that point. However, the conference is a critical one for these internet sites to show these fortune five hundred companies that information is useful and advertising on their sites is still very profitable. Companies have become wary of the patience that consumers seemed to have lost. Of course, this fast pace society has created much of this problem. The internet has made everything faster, and we process so much information every day, it does not take us very long to render the advertisement useless and to swipe it away with a touch. It is not up to the companies selling us products to find the solution to ad-blocking, it is really the social media and interface companies that need to overcome this constant need to swipe away advertisements.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/ad-blocking-is-a-hot-topic-for-marketing-media-executives-1443259981 

Post 1: Targeting Consumers in Emerging Economies

Back home in the United States, I would go to the internet or television network to advertise a new product that I planned on releasing to the public in the upcoming weeks. However, across the world in India, this is not the case. It is not a well-kept secret that India is an arguably the second largest emerging economy behind China, and one of the repercussions of this is a larger middle class. A formally mid-sized newspaper called the Hindi-Daily has recently installed additional printing presses to increase its production by one third. Since 2011, the paper’s circulation has risen 64%, to around 2.3 million. One of the more critical talking points, ad sales are up 61%. Now in most developed nations, the newspaper industries are tanking as the younger generations turn to the internet to find their information on both domestic and world news. Why buy a paper do get the sports section when you can look it up on your mobile device or your laptop in seconds?

However in India, most consumers are buying physical copies of newspaper due to the inaccessibility of smart phones, computers, and consistent internet access. Since the middle class has grown, many of these consumers want to be updated the world around them and seeking newspapers first hand for that. Of course companies looking for the most efficient way to target people in the second most populous country in the world will use the media outlet in which most consumers are diving into. Newspapers received 43% of the market share in advertising in 2014, compared to television at 38%. Even Amazon and Apple have begun to advertise in the Indian newspaper market because of its attraction to the general populous of the country.

Now, why has the newspaper industry seen such a growth in such a sudden capacity? Much of it has to do with the literacy rate in India. In 1951, less than 10% of females in India could read. That figure has jumped to 65% in 2011. In 1981, approximately 55% of males in India can read. The figure has increased to over 80% in just the last thirty years. This recent bump in literacy has resulted in a thirst for knowledge, which makes consumers more accessible to advertisers using newspapers as their faculty.

India’s newspaper industry is one of the fastest growing in the world, and marketers need to be aware of this to reach the largest market that they can with the least amount of expense possible. Of course, as more companies try to place advertisements in these papers, the outlets gain value and thus can raise their prices accordingly. I think it is a very positive sign for newspaper companies everywhere that there still is a market for it in some places. The industry has just been displaced by the internet in many of backyards. Companies need to know how large the reach is, and where to put there advertisements where their desired target market will see it. Jumping on the right media outlet gives companies the competitive edge, but also creates brand recall and thus makes their competition forgettable. This is the goal we need to have as marketers and salesmen alike.

http://www.iipsenvis.nic.in/WriteReadData/UserFiles/image/Literacy%20rate%2001-11.jpg

http://www.wsj.com/articles/india-ink-newspapers-boom-where-the-internet-doesnt-reach-1441740780?tesla=y