Technology to avoid ads and blockers

When Allrecipes unveiled a revamped website on Tuesday, it billed the move as part of a broader transformation into a social network for food lovers. Among other new capabilities available to them, the site’s millions of users can now follow other cooks and share what they have made on Facebook.

But behind the redesign is also an attempt to make the site a more appealing destination for advertisers. The company is calling its new site an “always-on platform,” where brands can “be part of the conversation” by creating their own profile pages.

Stan Pavlovsky, the president of Allrecipes, said the offering would give brands a way to incorporate themselves into the cooking site and improve the consumer experience. Swanson, part of the Campbell Soup Co., has created a profile page that includes recipes for flank steak and spaghetti soup.

But there may also be another benefit, both for advertisers and for Allrecipes. A brand’s profile page – basically, a native advertisement – would almost certainly be immune to the simple software that has become a big source of anxiety for digital media companies: ad blockers.

“I think it’s become much more important for the industry to do native ads,” Pavlovsky said. “Our native experiences would not be filtered by an ad blocker because they’re part of our site experience.”

Ad blocking has troubled publishers for years. But the technology has dominated conversation in the industry in recent weeks, causing soul-sear-ching among publishers and advertisers as they rethink how to capture consumers’ attention and make the Web-browsing experience less cumbersome.

A report last month from Adobe and PageFair, an Irish startup that monitors ad blocking, projected that the software would lead to nearly $22 billion in lost revenue for advertisers this year. Roughly 200 million people globally use ad-blocking software; global usage increa-sed 41 per cent in the last year.

Moves by big players in Silicon Valley are adding to the concern. Most of the ad-blocking activity occurs on desktop Web browsers, according to the report, but Apple said recently that the latest version of its mobile operating system, iOS9, would allow users to download ad-blocking software. And on Tuesday, Google began blocking Flash ads on its Chrome browser.

“It’s an industry wake-up call,” said Joe Marchese, president of advanced advertising products at Fox Networks Gro-up and the chief executive of TrueX, an ad technology company that has been acquired by 21st Century Fox. “The current practice of loading up pages with ads is not working.”

Ad experts say privacy concerns are driving consumers to run ad blockers. But more than that, many users want to speed up the Web-browsing experience, which is bogged down by a glut of intrusive ads.

‘Advertising’ arms race

Some in the industry predict that the increasing use of ad blockers – on desktops and mobile devices – will lead to an arms race among publishers, advertisers and consumers. As more consumers block ads, publishers and advertisers will look for new ways to reach them, either through marketing techniques or with technology.

Advertisers, for instance, can pay some ad blockers a fee to ensure their ads will get through to the consumer. Many publishers like Allrecipes are also offering native advertising products, which are increasingly seen as an effective way to reach consumers.

These ads often resemble news articles or blog posts and are incorporated into websites and social feeds alongside editorial or user-generated content. Yahoo, Forbes, BuzzFeed and The New York Times are among the growing number of publishers with native ads.

The goal is to give consumers something that feels less like an ad and more like content they would choose to read or watch. “We want to make sure that while we’re still able to meet the needs by our advertising partners when it comes to traditional ads, we want to lean in much heavier to the native ads,” Pavlovsky of Allrecipes said.

Advertisers themselves, however, are far less concerned about ad blocking than they are about other issues, like ad fraud and viewability. More than that, industry executives see the rise of ad blockers as a self-created beast, fed by long-standing pressure to cram data-heavy, annoying ads onto the page. But where publishers might be worried, the ad industry instead sees blockers as an impetus to make advertising simpler and more engaging.

“Advertisers and agencies have to raise their game,” said Ben Winkler, the chief digital officer at the agency OMD. “Not only will bad advertising be ignored, it may never be seen.”