Happy Monday, marketers! For this week’s performance marketing news roundup, we looked at some of the issues plaguing the digital advertising industry ranging from a lack of transparency to mobile ad blocking—and what some companies are doing to combat them. We also take a look at an interesting way that retailer Jo-Ann Fabric hopes to tie together offline and online customer experiences.
ANA Calls for Independent Audits of Ads in the ‘Walled Gardens’
As reported in Marketing Land, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) today issued a call for independent audits in the “walled garden” advertising platforms of Amazon, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat and Twitter. As defined by the ANA, a walled garden is “a platform where the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applications or content.” Transparency has become a huge issue in the digital advertising industry, which is beset by complex technology and transactions that are often conducted inside hidden environments.
Mobile Ad Blocking Takes Off in Asia, Sparked by User Data Costs
Whereas only 1.7 million American smartphones users had browsers with default ad blocking installed at this point last year, 116 million did in China, 89 million did in India and 28 million did in Indonesia. According to Ad Exchanger, the reason many people block ads in APAC markets is not annoyance or poor user experience, which were the principle factors in the rise of desktop ad blocking in the US and Europe. It’s data cost, pure and simple.
Crafty Retailer Jo-Ann Fabric Aims to Retarget its In-Store Wi-Fi Users
Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft Stores wants to retarget its in-store Wi-Fi users with ads served online, as reported in AdAge. Brick-and-mortar retailers have been trying to increase sales through a variety of technologies and data offerings, such as mobile location data showing whether their ads influenced people to visit their stores, or beacons, which help determine where in stores people linger while shopping. While Wi-Fi seems like a basic provision for large retailers, for Jo-Ann, it is a relatively cost-effective means of obtaining an important data key to link their physical interaction with the brand to their online identities.
