I read an interesting article recently written by a friend of mine that turned out to be very topical to our most recent class. Harry St. John works at LinkedIn in our marketing department. Ironically, I also happened to coach his older brother while was a lacrosse player over ten year ago. That however, is another story for a different day.
Anyway, Harry commented on the constant game of whack-a-mole that currently exists between publishers and ad-blockers. While publishers are going to greater and greater lengths to allow companies to advertise, the problem does not look like it is going to go away any time soon. It really is just the side-effect of bad advertising. In fact, a recent survey found that 75% of people have become motivated to black ads because of their intrusiveness. Frankly, if marketers created content that was compelling enough for potential customers to want to see it, it wouldn't be blocked.
At LinkedIn, sponsored update campaigns are one of the fasted growing offerings of our marketing solutions. Companies are typically only allowed to share content with users that follow their company. However, with sponsored updates, a company can now share particularly compelling information with anyone our platform deems relevant. The campaign is done on a CPC model. Customers only pay for the clicks, not the numbers of impressions. Once the post have been made, LinkedIn offers analysis that shows the level of engagement, and how many new followers were gained for time the update.
With a focus on providing value, it is not uncommon to see 20, 30, or even 40% additional value driven from the free social actions that follow the initial release. People don’t want to block a well-executed a sponsored update; they want to share it.
There will be much debate about ad-blockers in the future as the game of whack-a-mole continues, but it would be great if marketers took this recent increase in blockers as a call to focus on well targeted, interesting ads.
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