There's an ongoing debate, some would say panic in 'ad land' which includes the agency ecosystem, who its seems, are keen to perpetuate an advertising model which has been broken for sometime, and for many its literally killing the ad industry, its bottom feeders, and worse still your brand.

Without a doubt they are losing our attention, and with that change in behaviour there's huge disruption taking place - you see they're stuck between giving us intrusive ads, paywalls, or if your a paying Sky subscriber - both!.

Without a doubt the (advertising) industry is in meltdown, as they struggle to adjust from old school 'push/intrusive' advertising models to 'pay walls & pain walls'. 

The growth in access to technology and increased data regulation that's empowering audiences to take charge around how, when, and where they consume content has required a radical and innovative rethink of how everyone in the content ecosystem can sustain commercial viability!

Usually the real objective of a TV advert (other channels apply) is about subliminally injecting a brands solution to your perceived problem into your subconscious.

So when you're looking for 'the solution' the objective is you think of them first - Infomercials are a completely different blog altogether.

Today they can measure that 'recall' after your ad has played out via a number of different ways, here's two of them (if your a marketing guru apologies this is nothing new);

1. Direct Traffic spikes into your website a short time after the ad is played out might suggest that someone remembered the brand, curiosity kicked in and they went straight to their website - your ad agency will always claim this as the ad attribution in action. This is called 'direct traffic'.
2. Search Driven traffic spikes which are seen as assisted (indirect traffic) visits from other sources, these tend to be from our friends at 'Google' (other search engines are available). What happens here is people can't recall the brand name but something in the ad creative stuck with them. 

So, just pause, have a think about that entire journey and process, from the initial creative idea for the campaign to all that cost to produce the advert. Following that is the even greater cost of 'buying' that media space for the advert to be shown at the right time to (hopefully) a relevant audience!.

Once all this is done you cross your fingers that your prospects are then prepared to do the extra mile, to go and find you, work out how to navigate your website funnel, and then decide if they can 'trust' you - it's exhausting, and extremely expensive.

Being 'front of mind' in today's 'ad intrusive world has become faster and cheaper for brands, all due to the invention of 'programmatic fraud ridden ad buying exchanges, thankfully its counter measure is 'ad skipping, and ad blocking' for you and me. 

As the global increase in audience behaviour for 'ad skipping' and 'ad blocking' combined with continued fraud (50%-75%) associated with programmatic continues to rise unabated.

As such it is vital that content owners, creators, broadcasters & advertisers establish non-intrusive audience friendly viable alternatives for generating insights, attribution and revenues from what is still a growing appetite across all channels to consume content.

In summary, you and me (the audience) don't want those intrusive ads being 'pushed' at us anymore....but, we still want the content!  

I personally subscribe to many 'industry' related online news sites. 

I utilise them many times in order I can share with you my thoughts on what's going on in the industry.

Over the last 12 months I've started to see my once 'free' eat all you can access being reduced to bite sized chunks before being hit with the 'paywall', or as I like to call it the 'pain-wall'.

I now find I'm 'unsubscribing' to the ones that tease me with a few words, and then ask that I pay for what is essentially curated content gathered from the internet, or paid writers. 

And after all that free sharing, and engagement as well??

Now don't get me wrong, as someone who creates an awful lot of content I can certainly understand that none of this is done for free, someone has to pay for those big blockbuster movies, the music created by amazing artist, and TV shows for us all to binge watch, and if I were to pro-rata my cost versus the time it takes to give you all my ramblings in blogs, post, and Vlogs then I would need to charge you a hefty price, but that isn't my motive, nor is it my business model. 

We've already entered into the world of 'content discovery', this fundamental shift is already disrupting how companies win and lose out to competitors.

The consumer (that's you and me in case for you forgot) are already saying 'we don't want your intrusive ads' so as the debate, and the move to more and more 'pay walls' continues.

So, just what is your strategy to compete in the world of Millennial's and Generation Z' who by the way don't want to pay for anything, and can't even get their head around why we all put up with all that intrusion.

As much as you might want things to remain the same the 'Genie' is well and truly out of the 'Digital Lamp'.