AD Block Challenge | D&D | Our Solution

A Start Up idea designed for #StartUpLab vertical of #ADandPRLAB, at Panteion University, assigned by Spiros Kapetanakis and Betty Tsakarestou, Head of #ADandPRLAB, under the supervision of Katerina Vlassopoulou.

Trying hard to tackle the Ad Block phenomenon, we came up with BLOCK VALUE, which is both an ad tech platform that focuses on delivering quality and undetectable native ad content to Ad Block Software users, while providing at the same time publishers with the ability to run “social experiments” at a certain percentage of Ad Block users each time (1%). This will result in gathering insights based on users recorded browsing behavior. “Social Ad Experiments” mean that we deteriorate content quality on given website on purpose so as to make clear to users that lost ad revenue could eventually led to that reality.

Analytically:

→ BlockValue is a three-step platform, that provides:

1. ANALYTICS ABOUT USERS BEHAVIOUR:
   BlockValue is a highly developed platform, that provides statistics and analytics about AdBlock users browsing behaviour, info that seem to be really useful for publishers, with which we have created partnerships. This way, they are always up to date with the latest trends and circumstances, that structure the digital world of today.
2. NATIVE AD CONTENT:
   As the intrusive ad formats have been banned because of AdBlock software, we offer new native ad content to replace the banned ones in an alternative, truely new way of advertising, that will no more be irritating for the users. These ads will be incoroporated at the main body of the websites as articles, in which clients are going to be advertised in a way that AdBlock will not be able to detect them.
3. SOCIAL AD EXPERIMENTS:
   Our collaboration with publishers will necessarily lead to a common agreement, according to which they have to provide us with the ability to use 1% of their monthly visitors for our social ad experiments. That means that we will deteriorate content quality on given website on purpose with the claim that the lost revenue, that the banned ads have caused, has lead to such a result, so as to write down the noticed users browsing behaviour after this bad experience (either keep AdBlock software or uninstall it). These experiments are great a way for us to understand in real time how users react to a bad browsing experience and simultaneously how willing they are or how easy is for them to unistall AdBlock software. Based on these results, we will gradually schedule our further steps and strategy.

It is obvious that we are going to collaborate with publishers that own websites with more than 100,000 monthly impressions (so as to ensure that 1% of their visitors is a very low percentage), such us THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE GUARDIAN, CNN, HUFF.POST, etc, and with advertisers.

At this point, we would like to thank Spiros Kapetanakis, Betty Tsakarestou and Katerina Vlassopoulou for providing us with the chance to cope with a real time problem of the whole digital world of today.

THE TEAM: Anastasia Zapadioti, Fotini Panavou, Izabella Kefala, Margaret Georgiadou and Vasilis Plegas.