Senior stakeholders summit on the blocked Web, 25 April 2016 For review by participants

DCN and PageFair convened a roundtable discussion on the future of advertising with senior stakeholders, held at MEC Global in New York. The roundtable drew together senior representatives of consumer groups, advertisers, agencies, publishers, and browsers.

The intention was to learn how to better respect users, support publishers, and provide value to advertisers.

This was a follow up to previous PageFair roundtables at The Financial Times in late 2015 and at Mozilla in London in March 2016.

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Chatham House Rule

The meeting was held under the Chatham House Rule. Therefore the views of individual participants are not recorded in these notes. https://www.chathamhouse.org/about/chatham-house-rule

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Main take away points

The following is a synthesis of points that emerged from the global stakeholders’ roundtables (majority rather than consensus view).

1. On the blocked Web the user must have immediate tools to reject and to complain about advertising.

2. Rather than restore all ads on the blocked Web only a limited number of premium advertising slots should be restored. This will make a better impact for brands, clean up the user experience, and incentivize better creative.

3. The blocked Web may provide the opportunity to establish a new form of above the line advertising.

4. Contextual targeting can be used on the blocked Web to establish ad relevance if other forms of tracking are not practical or desirable.

5. On the blocked Web, where third party tracking is largely blocked, publishers can create new value by engaging with their users to elicit volunteered data.

6. Measuring advertising success on the blocked Web with broader top-of-funnel metrics may incentivize buyers to focus on value rather than cheapness. A second benefit is that such metrics (example: engagement time) can be unified across digital and non-digital media.

7. On the Web as a whole there should be a maximum pageload time standard that publishers and advertisers both commit to. The growing hazard of adblocking may incentivize this.

The causes of adblocking

There was agreement on the following reasons why people block ads (these reasons are intentionally listed in no particular order):

•Ads obscure content •Unclear user expectations and inconsistent ad experiences •Privacy •Bandwidth •Slow website load •Security •Because they can

These reasons fall in to three categories: user experience (annoyance, obstruction), performance (security, page load time), and privacy. Data cost is an additional motivating factor in developing countries where data costs are high.

There was agreement that blame for this situation was shared among all industry stakeholders. In part this is the result of a focus on cheapness at the expense of value, and of an overabundance of ad inventory supply.

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We organized this roundtable to save the open Web

A growing segment of Web users see few or no ads. We are witnessing the collapse of the mechanism that has supported the diversity of content on the open Web since the 1990s. But even as blocking of advertising harms publishers it also creates a new set of opportunities.

Adblocking has created a ‘blocked Web’ where virtually all ads are blocked. Even so, the technology exists to display ads on the blocked Web. Therefore, while agencies and advertisers use established measurement and targeting on the normal Web, the blocked Web provides them with a new and separate opportunity to respond to blockers with contextual targeting that does not track users, and to communicate on a new and uncluttered online arena.

It is this parallelism – the ability of agencies to pursue advertising beyond blocking while at the same time maintaining their existing channels – that will give publishers an opportunity to sustain themselves beyond adblocking, and which will bring new value to advertisers while respecting the user.