The landscape of digital advertising is going to undergo some serious changes in 2018 as marketers will have to figure out new ways to spend their online ad dollars.
As advertising has continued to pervade, invade and annoy the internet, tech companies are responding to user complaints about speed-dragging banners, auto-play videos and retargeting that follows consumers around the web. People have been using third-party ad blockers, particularly on Google’s Chrome, for years, but now the big tech players are integrating their own ad-blocking technology into their browsers.
Apple’s iOS 11 rollout, released on Sept. 19, includes several new features, one of which is an updated Safari browser. Another change to the popular browser is a new privacy feature that will block the tracking of certain cookies, known as Intelligent Tracking Prevention. This will curtail some of the “following around” websites do with their ads.
Likewise, Google announced that Chrome, which is currently the most-used browser on the web, will stop auto-playing videos with audio starting in 2018.
This isn’t a complete silencing of internet advertisers, as there are several exceptions. For instance, Safari is only going to block first-party cookies that are more than 30 days old, meaning if you go to Amazon every day, you’re still going to see ads for that banana slicer you’ve been eyeing. And Chrome will only block auto-play videos with audio, so if the video is muted by default, it will still play.
This isn’t a wholesale altering of the online ad industry, but it is changing what has been the status quo and may be sign of more changes to come. Several advertising trade associations have come out condemning Apple’s decision to “sabotage the economic model for the internet.” But it doesn’t appear as though Apple and Google intend to back down.
It remains to be seen how digital marketers will respond as their delivery channels change, but it does mean that they will need to be agile to keep up with a public that is growing increasingly hostile toward invasive ads. The tech companies are listening, and they’re making changes.