Opinion: Combating the growth of ad blocking
Unibet's head of mobile marketing Richard Lee explains how the egaming industry should react to the threat of ad blocking software
The growing use of ad blocking software is predicted to hit worldwide ad revenues by an incredible £14bn this year, according to recent reports, with hundreds of millions of people now estimated to be regular users of the major ad extensions. Younger people are far more inclined to download such browser extensions which means it’s certainly not a problem going away anytime soon.
It may come as a surprise then that I don’t think ad blocking is actually a major problem for the egaming industry today, nor should it keep marketing teams up at night. However, it could do very soon. From a personal point of view, the advancements in ad blocking technology on desktop are far more mature than they are on mobile, which means I haven’t feared ad blocking too much. The main issue for Unibet is simple; making sure we have quality content out there that doesn’t get flagged by software such as AdBlock or Adblock Plus.
Taking the initiative
Although I don’t think the problem is that great yet, the industry should definitely not remain flat-footed and prepare for the worst. With this in mind, there are a number of techniques egaming marketers can use to ensure they don’t fall foul of an ad blocking software’s strict guidelines for avoiding detection. Using the correct keywords to make sure it’s not too spammy is certainly one of these. I generally don’t like the term risk free bet – although I understand that’s what the consumers are interested in – but I try and present it as a welcome offer to help us get through ad blocking servers.
Clever customer targeting is also important. At the end of the day the adverts we develop should be going in front of gamers, people interested in gambling and be predominantly based on sports-related targeting. If it ends up on a lifestyle or celebrity gossip magazine site, then that’s obviously poor targeting. We need to be targeting the right people and I’m working on the assumption that people who read lifestyle magazines don’t usually gamble with Unibet.
Although I haven’t seen any examples yet, in-app ad blocking could potentially be the real game-changer. It seems like the technology is just starting to be developed and I would imagine it would most likely start with Android and then move on to iOS after that. When it does become available we’ll take it on a case-by-case basis. We’ll have to assess the software capabilities at the time but for now we’re going to keep producing advertisements and content that’s viable, appealing and attractive.
What the future holds
Like many companies in the egaming industry, we’re currently conducting tests around iOS9 ahead of its planned roll-out within the next couple of days. The new Apple operating system is set to allow content blocking within its Safari mobile web browser for the first time. We haven’t found a solution to this yet but we will continue to test and are confident we will be fully prepared in time. It’s to our advantage that with iOS functionality it often takes some time for new users to discover it and figure it out, which gives us some time to enables us to come up a solution.
But why is ad blocking only now becoming so popular among the general public and what can we learn from this? Personally I think it’s a number of reasons but the main one being that ads have just become far too intrusive. I’m a big Manchester United fan and I get a lot of Man Utd-targeted adverts in completely random places which is quite freaky. It does become a situation where, although I’m a fan, there’s a limit as to how much information I want presented to me by an unknown party.
We are also living in a much more advanced world and, to be honest, I’m quite surprised that ad blocking software has only just become popular. I think another important reason ad blocking software has been brought in is because of the forced user journey that’s become much more common, such as when a customer is in an app or on a website and they’re forced into the app store without clicking anything. It’s not something we employ at Unibet as we think it’s a pretty bad journey for the customer.
As always, the key thing when you’re doing advertising or mobile marketing is to not be irritating. This is what we try to avoid with the ads we produce and hopefully will help counter any prominent ad blocking in the next few months.