What Acceptable Ads Means to BuySellAds
Digital advertising is broken, and it will take a village to fix it.
I’m excited to announce BuySellAds’s participation in the Acceptable Ads Committee. The committee will be made up of voices across digital advertising including consumer advocates, experts, advertisers, publishers, agencies, advertising technology firms, and users.
Together we’ll share the goal of creating new standards for digital advertising by setting criteria for the Acceptable Ads program. Through this program, ad block companies whitelist and serve ads that meet user experience standards. Acceptable Ads can’t be distracting or block, overwhelm, or blend with content. Users can opt-out of seeing these ads by changing default settings.
BuySellAds will be joining other companies to chart the industry’s preferred course in the future of digital advertising. Our top priorities include fostering open dialogue with partners, representing a strong consumer voice, and creating new user experience standards that repair trust.
Foster open dialogue between ad tech companies
Online media has traditionally blamed anything but itself for the sorry state of digital advertising. But industry focus on open exchange buying models has had a direct effect on shrinking publisher revenue and diminishing ad quality, not to mention tracking, privacy, and security concerns.
Collectively, we’ve focused so heavily on innovation and monetization that we’ve forgotten about ethics and users. It shouldn’t be surprising that ad blocker installations are growing — people will always opt out of things they hate, and there isn’t much to love about today’s digital media.
Initially, 12 representatives will form the Acceptable Ads Committee ad tech group. Our approaches to advertising vary wildly, and I hope our combined involvement will foster industry-wide solutions to user experience and trust issues that haven’t been taken seriously in other settings.
Perhaps these conversations will have even deeper impacts beyond Acceptable Ads, sparking more ethical business approaches to user data sharing and monetization.
Be a strong voice for consumers
BuySellAds believes ad tech only succeeds when it works for advertisers, publishers and consumers. That’s why we design our products to serve relevant, high-quality ads that protect privacy and flow with publisher content. In a blog post last year, I asked what ad tech might look like if more companies prioritized the needs of content consumers at the engineering and monetization levels.
Acceptable Ads might be one of the best examples of this at work. It was created as a compromise for users who wanted to avoid annoying ads while supporting publishers that serve quality advertising. In other words, it created a middle ground where people could support publishers that take audience privacy and experience seriously.
The Acceptable Ads Committee splits user advocates from for-profit companies, but everyone should have consumers’ best interests in mind to avoid an “us against them” mentality. In the ad tech group, I know BuySellAds will advocate for audience interests to create better advertising that works for publishers, advertisers, and consumers. We’ve focused on building a sustainable ecosystem since our founding in 2008.
Hold online advertising to a higher standard
It’s no secret that people have opted for ad blockers because of glaring user experience issues. The industry has missed several opportunities to eliminate the need for ad blockers by building better ads.
Acceptable Ads uses strict criteria to ensure users only see non-intrusive ads from trusted advertisers. The program’s high standards make us proud to say that Carbon ads have been whitelisted in Acceptable Ads for a couple of years.
Usability, design, and placement are key parts of the user experience equation, and we feel strongly that all three have huge room for improvement across digital advertising. On the committee, we’ll continue pushing for non-intrusive ads that protect user privacy and improve user experience.
A final note to the critics
Since this initiative and its participants were announced, widespread criticism from the media status quo has rung out across the Twitter-sphere and in various reports.
We’re not an advocate of Eyeo’s paid whitelisting model, but ad blocking is here to stay. We have more to gain from working with it than rallying against it.
Ad blocking’s existence and speed of growth is directly related to our failure as an industry. Ad tech is complicit in $16.4B in ad fraud each year — making it one of the largest criminal enterprises in history. We’ve also blindly let programmatic middlemen strip away revenue from publishers and create an ecosystem that rewards clickbait and fake news at the expense of quality journalism. It’s no wonder why most publishers are experiencing a revenue crisis.
The media industry has devolved into an utter failure under the IAB’s watch, and we all share responsibility. We’re past the point of ignoring opinions that don’t align with industry interests. Remember when the IAB planned a user experience summit with no UX professionals?
The biggest strength of the Acceptable Ads Committee is its diversity of opinion from user advocates, for-profit companies, and experts. Open dialogue between these groups will be fundamental to the maturation of Acceptable Ads and the entire digital advertising industry. We believe Eyeo is genuine in bringing this initiative forward to improve our industry, and we encourage participation from others in the space.
The Acceptable Ads Committee is an opportunity for ad tech to evolve, and we’re excited to see how we can improve our industry together.
