The elephant in mobile’s corner; Big ad, low-level product

Adblocking now threatens mobile more than any other channel, so why has the industry collectively stopped talking about it, asks Dominic Mills. Plus: Why Heinz’s new Salad Cream ad should be served with a dollop of euthanasia

It’s strange how the industry focus constantly shifts. Two years ago, you couldn’t have a conversation without the subject of ad-blocking coming up. Today, hardly anyone talks about it.

But that doesn’t mean the subject has gone away. It’s still with us, and potentially a bigger problem than before, judging by this WARC precis of the latest stats from GlobalWebIndex.

According to this, just under 33% of global internet users have deployed a mobile ad blocker in the last month. Yes, this is less than for PC/desktop users (the comparable figure is 37.5%). But it’s the elephant in the room for mobile, which is where ad budgets are rising fastest and which has already overtaken PC/desktop in the UK and most other markets by share, including the biggest – the US and China. You can download a slightly older, wider view, direct from GlobalWebIndex here.

Depending on your geographical focus, you might find these figures alarming or perhaps, in the it-could-be-a lot-worse sense, mildly comforting. The highest incidence of mobile ad blocking is the APAC region (around 38%), which is different from the US and Europe in two key respects: one, the populations are younger; and two, led by China, they are mobile-first markets, or more so than elsewhere.

The lowest is in Europe (around 22%). Hooray. But wait. Remember the Coalition for Better Ads, a coalition of the industry’s great and good (i.e. not those grubby retargeting bastards) who come together to make all ads beautiful and all ad experiences joyful and make people want to unblock their blockers.
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Despite this, and various efforts by Google to put its shoulder to the wheel – including blocking ‘bad’ ads by default, those on autoplay, and penalising ad-heavy pages with long load times – it feels like the industry is pushing water uphill. I don’t know if they’re slowing adblocking, but they’re certainly not defeating it.

And this difference between Europe and APAC is, suggests GlobalWebIndex, unlikely to be sustained. As more activities migrate from desktop to mobile, driven by usage habits, improved phone functionalities and larger screens, so mobile blockage rates will grow. By way of comparison, PC/desktop blocking levels stand at 38% in Europe.

It’s not a cheery picture, and it’s potentially compounded, I think, by the paradox of personalisation. I say paradox because, for many in the industry, personalisation is the great saviour of the digital advertising eco-system. Really?

The main reasons people block ads differ by age group, according to GlobalWebIndex, but among 35-65s it’s the potentially intrusive nature of personalisation.

Now I don’t necessarily subscribe to the view that advertisers should focus more of their efforts on the 35+ sector because that’s the one with more disposable income, but it is unarguable that is the dominant demographic in Europe and the US, and therefore on sheer weight of numbers alone should take the lion’s share of budgets.

All this is before we even get to GDPR, another subject to slip out of the top three conversation topics in the last few months. Nobody quite knows how GDPR plays through into adblocking, but I can think of two possible ways: one, consumers gradually become more aware over time of the power they now have over their data and privacy and withhold that information; and two, for those that do opt-in, the promise is that they will be served more relevant, more personalised ads.

Neither scenario suggests, therefore, that adblocking will do anything other than become more widespread. And it’s mobile that is most at risk.

Big ad, bottom-shelf product

Pic via Twitter

I don’t live in a cave, I consume ad-funded media and I look at posters too. But I can’t remember the last time I saw a Heinz ad…oh, apart from a baked beans ad which got banned in July – for the second time.

Until last month that is, when I saw this monster poster on the IMAX on Waterloo Bridge for Heinz Salad Cream or, as the ad put it, lasagne-with-salad-cream or pizza-with-salad-cream.

No chance to block this one out. I’ve probably seen it eight times over a two-week period. It’s classic use of OOH to give profile and presence to a low-profile product – 18 years after another ‘relaunch’.

FFS, I thought after the sixth viewing, there’s an alarming possibility we might have a bottle at the back of the cupboard. Or maybe we threw it out when we moved six years ago. Either way I can’t remember. Which pretty much tells you all you need to know about Heinz Salad Cream: truly a lonely and unloved product.

A bit like Spam and sherry, Heinz Salad Cream comes from another time. That’s why no-one knows how to use it, and why owners of such brands have only two tactics at their disposal.

One is to think up new uses for the product – hence the ads, which are essentially recipe suggestions. Every Spam relaunch centres on this, as do most sherry ads.

The second is a name change, which Heinz, cynically invoking the term of the moment – a ‘People’s Vote’ – says the great British public has single-mindedly rejected, thus saving the name for posterity. Phew.

Yeah, right. More like supreme indifference on the part of the ‘voters’.

The question then is whether Heinz, via advertising, can make the product relevant and exciting again.

You’d expect, therefore, some retail razzmatazz: gondola ends, sexy bottles, in-store tastings, recipe cards, shelf-wobblers galore.

But no. I visited two supermarkets, and there it was – isolated and near-invisible on the bottom shelf, and marked down by a third in price, feeling decidedly sorry for itself.

There’s no attempt to join up the ads and the retail experience.

I don’t know if this is a do-or-die effort by Heinz, but this has the feel of amateurs at work. Euthanasia would be kinder, and quicker too.

And this, by the way, from parent company Kraft Heinz – as in the one that’s supposed to know about brands, and which tried (and failed) to buy Unilever last year.