September 2015 has witnessed some big announcements in the online advertising space. It seems the online advertising companies are looking to create more direct channels to target customers and others are trying to block the efforts.  And we aren’t talking about small players here.

New online advertising tools

New to online advertising offerings, Google announces “Customer Match”.

Similar to Twitter’s “Tailored Audience” and

Facebook’s “Custom Audience”,

now Google will allow advertisers to upload client lists including emails and phone numbers for advertising targeting purposes.

We already see “retargeting ads” which seem to follow us around the internet as we browse. These type of ads are presented to you because you visited a particular advertiser’s site and the advertisers has purchased “retargeting ads” which will then follow you because you have already shown the smallest of interest from your visit to their site.

Now with the new customer list targeting provided by all the major players, advertisers can upload multiple lists of prospects to target. For example, perhaps a retailer specializes in fishing equipment, they can purchase lists with emails and phone numbers of people who are interested in fishing and target them.  Whenever the targeted customer logs into their social media accounts and surfs the web they will be presented the targeted ads.

With the anti-spam legislation in Canada and the US, emailing is becoming less effective and much more difficult to create new mailing lists. Now with customer list targeting instead of emails, an advertiser spending a couple of dollars on advertising can target the new prospects without breaking any laws.  As well, it is also much more difficult to “unsubscribe” from online advertising!

On the flip side

On the flip side, Apple announced that it will support advertising blocking on all apple devices. Some have reported that this will change the way the internet will work. 

The majority of content online today is ad supported content. With ads being blocked, content creators and advertisers will have to find alternatives.

Apparently ad blocking is also causing some other issues for big retailers such as Walmart.

It has been reported that some of the advertising blocking software has actually blocked retail content from being presented to shoppers through mobile devices.

This ad blocking issue is a problem for ALL online commerce sites.

Back to traditional media?

Could all of this push at least some of the advertising dollars back to traditional media such as Newspapers and TV? A least this is something the newspapers and broadcasters can talk about to drum up some more business for their properties.  

They have to do something, look at the following chart from IAB Canada.

Source: IAB CANADA

One thing for sure, your customer list will become increasingly important so continue building the lists!