Discussion

By Jules Vansant on Jan 22, 2016

Happy New Year Frank! I don't always agree with your thoughts but on this one... you nailed it!

Patience is paying off for those who produce print & rode the financial wave well these past 8 years. Understanding the integration of print, mobile & web is key to long term success in sales, management & investments.

Ad agencies & marketers will either see the light and diversify their spends once again towards more print in the mix or, as many groups who didn't see the digital age coming, will go off into the sunset.

My 99 cents :) Cheers!

By Dov Isaacs on Jan 23, 2016

FWIW, there are several reasons why ad-blockers are so popular. The presence of ads themselves on web-sites is not the real problem.

I contend that it is a combination of factors that turn us off to those ads:

(1) Intrusive ads. This includes ads that not only start playing video, but do so with the sound turned up full blast. It also includes ads that take over the entire web page until dismissed or force you to look at them for a certain amount of time.

(2) Too many ads on a single page. I've visited website that are saturated with many ads from various sources. Multiple videos or animated GIFs appearing on a simple web page are downright annoying.

(3) Overhead - time and data. Combining (1) and (2) above all of which result in calls to other servers/websites for data combined with the propensity to collect all sorts of analytics also referencing to other servers/websites with bidirectional network traffic result in websites that take way too long to load and rack up many megabytes of data transfer, even making gigabit network connections look slow. (It is amazing how many complaints I hear from my customers about the size of PDF files that they want to post for download. Many if not most such PDF files are lean and svelte compared to the monstrous data transfers that invoking some websites cause before anything is even displayed.

Quite frankly (pun obviously intended), although the forced awareness if not full viewing of ads in printed publications may draw some advertisers back to print, the real challenge for advertisers, on-line ad brokers (you know who they are), and website owners is to make the on-line, website ads MORE EFFECTIVE by not oversaturating the viewer with more than they are willing to put up with in terms of too much cr*p on the screen and too much overhead to load the desired webpage. It is this oversaturation and overhead which I contend is the major reason why many of us employ ad-blockers!

I can easily see a future in which prospective advertisers are more selective in where they allow their ads to be placed based on the quality of the experience of the prospective host website including limited number of ads and time to load - and this they may be willing to pay a premium for.

By Dov Isaacs on Jan 23, 2016

Oh, and by the way, Frank is now on a ship on his way to drupa.

By John Werner on Jan 26, 2016

Frank is on his fourth Cunard around the world cruise, eventually reaching Europe and Drupa. What a nice way to avoid flying! John Werner

By Werner Rebsamen on Jan 29, 2016

Old folks travels - on his last trip around the World, Frank, of all the passengers, was the youngest! I wonder if this is still the case.