If your a regular reader of my Blogs it won't come as a surprise that I've been beating the drum for the past 6 years about the fact you, me, and many millions of other people around the world are blocking, and skipping intrusive adverts.

If you spend your marketing budget on digital advertising then this topic should be front and centre of each marketing and agency review meeting you have, along with trying to address what is now proving to be a diminishing media marketing landscape.

If your a publisher or broadcaster you've no doubt spent years and quite a lot of money building up your audiences only to now see most of the advertising revenues that used to support your journalist, content editors, back office staff and all those fixed overheads pre-Covid going over to the duopoly of Google and Facebook.

Throw into that heady mix the myriad of middle men in Ad Tech land taking their slice ahead of you, the unabated rise of ad blockers, and advertisers becoming even more aware of the abusive ad fraud industry, it's no wonder that you're finding it difficult to keep going.

You don't need a reminder from me that if you worked in agency land things are not what they once were, especially as some huge global brands are now looking to boycott social media 'paid media' campaigns and spend due to concerns around which piece of content their brand message will end up against.

I recently picked up what seems like a relatively small news story with potentially interesting implications for publishers and broadcasters; link below

Google says it will start paying some publishers for their news content, in a move that could pave the way for reduced tensions between the internet search giant and the beleaguered news industry.

To be honest one of the reasons I stopped visiting most of these news related websites was down to the overload of ads that slowed pages down, it simply made it very difficult to see any of the news for ads. Try visiting 'Forbes' or any other news websites and you will experience the same wait whilst all those ads get loaded.

The truth is that the Television, magazine, and news paper (publishing) industries are not in the business of content, they're in the business of audience aggregation.

The production and creation of content is a means to an end in order to drive bigger audiences from which they can monetise those eyeballs via advertising, and to do this they need to produce and serve us content that captures our attention.

And guess what the delivery and training of a 'social network' strategy that leverages  employee advocacy for the production of authentic content for social media has in common with the above?

if done with the right training and support It also encourages engagement, it increases your network, reach, and visibility - and it doesn't carry any intrusive adverts.