• by Felicia Greiff , November 17, 2015

Marketers need to get hip to native advertising to combat ad blocking in 2016, according to a report from Hotwire PR.

In its “Communications Trends 2016” report, Hotwire PR asserted the marketing industry isn’t ready to respond to ad blocking.

In a 2014 survey from Adobe and PageFair, 28% of U.S. Internet users claimed they use adblock software when browsing, and this year, iOS9 launched the iPhone operating system update that enabled ad blockers and delivered a blow to the marketing and publishing industries.

Still, “consumers understand that publishers need a revenue source of some kind,”  Antti Pasila, CCO and founder of digital ad platform Kiosked, told Real-Time Daily. Pasila, also quoted in the Hotwire report, added,  “I know that if publishers can make the experience better for consumers, they’ll start opting for that experience.”

Pasila said the problem is that consumers feel the trade for getting content for free isn’t balanced. Pages get bogged down with ad placements, and the user experience takes a hit. Additionally, click-through rates decrease and the share of a brand’s voice goes down when they’re one of many brand ads on a page. 

Native ad placement offers a higher probability that consumers will see an ad, Pasila said. He added publishers can monetize with fewer units in a more targeted way. “That’s how we feel and that’s what we see with publishers we work with,” Pasila said.

The Hotwire PR report also predicted that next year marketers will stop targeting millennials -- opting instead to target based on a specific mindsets and values -- and virtual reality will become pervasive.