Sir Martin Sorrell: ‘Ad blockers aren’t a threat at the moment’
The emergence of ad blocking in 2015 may be worrying many publishers but WPP boss Sir Martin Sorrell doesn’t think they’re going to dent their commercial models just yet.
His reasoning is that most smartphone users spend the majority of their time within apps, which are outside of the ad blocking danger zone. Ad blockers that stop ads in apps are currently in limited supply and consequently the advertising veteran has downplayed the trend’s threat. Indeed, Apple pulled the plug on in-app ad blockers earlier this year after initially allowing what claimed to be the first to do so – Been Choice – into its app store.
“I don’t think ad blockers are a threat at the moment,” said Sir Martin during the last Nabs Tuesday Club Talk of the year. “iOS and Android dominate the market with 90 per cent of the operating systems. 90 per cent of that 90 per cent is on apps, which you can’t block – you might be able to do it at some point in time.”
It’s a stance shared by the Mail Online, which earlier this year said one of the benefits of encouraging readers to use its apps was that they were less likely to block its ads. Both Sir Martin’s and the Mail Online’s observations spotlight how most of the revenue being lost to ad blocking is from desktops. More than 98 per cent of ad blocking happens on PCs compared to just 1.6 per cent from mobile devices, according to a report from Adobe and PageFair.
The WPP boss then hit out at Google’s alleged attempt to bypass ad blocking earlier in the year. Google was accused to have tweaked YouTube’s code so that even if someone is using an ad blocker video ads will still appear before they get to watch what they want. The internet giant was also accused of disabling the skip option so that people were forced to watch the whole ad. It said both issues were not intentional and were related to a bug.
However, Sir Martin believes the company needs to take a firmer stance on the issue. “The best way to deal with ad blocking is for Google to say we’ll turn off the ad blockers on YouTube,” he argued.
Separately, the advertising executive moved to dispel the commonly held belief that media executives are creative. They are, according to Sir Martin, who is pivoting the world’s largest advertising network to be at the nexus of where the worlds of media and automation come together with the world of creativity. It’s why he has invested so much into building WPP’s own technology stack Xaxis to compete with Google’s Doubleclick and Facebook’s Atlas.
“The problem with our industry in part historically is that we’ve taken a really snotty attitude to creativity,” he added. “ This allocation of the word creative to people who make 60 second TV commercials is ludicrous.
“Our business is 75 per cent stuff that didn’t exist in the ‘Mad Men’ days. The people at Xaxis are highly creative; they developed their own tech Turbine. I could put that as strong as any lion being won at Cannes.”