Farmers Insurance Group recently pulled a million-dollar advertising deal with G/O Media after editorial staff spoke openly about how autoplay video ads are the absolute worst.
Things haven’t been smooth between G/O and the sites it oversees (onetime Gawker Media properties including Gizmodo, Deadspin, Jezebel, and others) since it took over in April of this year, but of all the dustups they’ve had, this is the most recent. Following numerous reader complaints about the new autoplay video ads popping up on the sites, the Deadspin editorial staff posted a statement acknowledging the complaints and soliciting further feedback about user experience, directing it toward the only people who could do anything about it: G/O’s senior leadership team. That went… as well as you might expect.
I’m not going to use this space for a complete rundown of the past six months in the life of G/O Media, or the future of it and its properties, because yikes. But I am going to say that those Deadspin editors might have actually been doing G/O and Farmers a favor, because autoplay video ads are the absolute worst.
And everyone says so.
Per reporting by the Wall Street Journal, G/O was on the hook to deliver nearly 43.5 million ad impressions through September of next year. When the first few weeks of the campaign showed that such a target was unrealistic, G/O’s ad team set the ads to auto-roll as soon as the pages loaded, which readers hated, because that’s something that people hate.
Haaate. In a 2016 survey by Hubspot, 79 percent of respondents said that autoplay ads generated an extremely or somewhat negative experience. Eighty-two percent of respondents said they’d closed a webpage because of an autoplay video, and 51 percent said they’d have a lower opinion of companies that used autoplay videos. (Sentiments were similar for pop-up ads, incidentally — 88 percent reported a negative experience, 81 percent had closed a page with pop-ups, and 70 percent would think less of a company that used them.)
Video, as an ad medium, is unmatched for its storytelling and connection-creating potential. Autoplay video, as an ad format, is the devil. And it’s also not as effective. A recent survey by OpenX, the Mobile Marketing Association, and MediaMath revealed that opt-in video ads — where viewers could choose to play the video and receive some form of value exchange — had a significantly higher completion rate than their autoplay cousins, and 80 percent of brand marketers reported that opt-in provides better ROI.
In the fight for digital ad attention and the battle against browser blindness, advertisers are turning to more attention-grabbing ad formats, and they’re going with the one that literally makes people think less of their brand.
Which is why people are blocking them.
A 2017 report from PageFair (pdf) (a company that makes its money helping bypass adblockers, btw) reported that 18 percent of people online in the U.S. use adblockers. (This could be overly modest — a 2019 report from GlobalWebIndex put it as high as 45 percent.) The leading reasons given are… interruptive ad formats like pop-ups and autoplays. And 74 percent report that when they visit a site with an adblock wall — an adblocker blocker, essentially — they’ll click away rather than disable their adblocker.
And for many people with disabilities, autoplaying videos and animated banners aren’t just a pain in the ass — they’re a pain in the cerebrum. Visitors with cognitive impairments can struggle to actually consume the content they’re there for when they have videos and banners jumping out at them from every side of the page. (As a person with ADHD, I could make you a list of sites I simply don’t visit anymore because I literally just Can’t.) Those ads can make screen readers basically useless for people with visual impairments who can’t browse without them. Some ads are enough to even trigger seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy.
A lot of sites are responding to the popularity of adblockers with a subscription wall, inviting visitors to whitelist their site or pay to consume the content. For people who just find intrusive ads to be annoying, that might be an option. But for people with accessibility issues, that’s pretty much a disability tax. Sorry you might have a seizure and die because of ads on our site — starting as low as $5 a month, you can have the same death-free experience that everyone else gets to have for free.
There is a better way.
If you’re a publisher: This doesn’t mean you can no longer make ad revenue from your site. If you’re a digital agency: This doesn’t mean you can no longer make digital ads for your clients. Just be responsible in the way you produce and deliver those digital ads.
Give people a break.
Don’t use autoplay videos. Just. Don’t.
Just don’t. It’s clearly not worth it. Some may advise including large, clearly marked “play” and “stop” buttons, and/or making it possible to close the video by hitting Esc, but I’m not going there. Just don’t use autoplay videos. And if you absolutely have to have an animated banner, have it run through two, maybe three cycles and then stop. If you’ve spun through twice and haven’t gotten your audience’s attention yet, you aren’t going to.
Think about mobile and mobility.
I know you specifically don’t want people to be able to avoid your ads, but sorry, you need to actually make a point of making them avoidable. You should already be optimized for mobile, of course, but if you aren’t, be sure any buttons to play or pause or escape your ads are big enough to hit with a big ol’ callused farmer thumb on a tiny touchscreen. On desktop, make sure those buttons are easy to access by someone who has limited mobility or is navigating using only their keyboard.
Make ads that people don’t hate.
In the aforementioned PageFair report, 77 percent of adblocker users said they did find some kinds of ads to be okay — the non-interruptive kind, like static banner ads and skippable videos. Many users have even explicitly agreed to be served such “acceptable” ads by their adblocker. So a good rule of thumb for advertisers interested in making non-obnoxious ads would be to follow the criteria for size, placement, and so on defined by the Acceptable Ads Committee, which is a real thing.
If you want to take advantage of the many benefits that audio and video can provide, go with click-to-play video. That puts your audience in control and is shown to provide better completion rates, click-through rates, and post-view engagement.
As VIEO Design’s Max Willner said in a blog post that you should absolutely go read in its entirety right now,
Successful digital ads don’t overtly disrupt the consumer’s browsing experience in an intrusive or annoying way. They make sense in the content and location where they’re placed, look professional, are easy to understand and use. They are well targeted to the consumer, so they’re relevant and speak the consumer’s language. They’re clear about what’s being offered, so people don’t feel tricked.
Importantly, great digital ads give people clear choice: to play the video, to close the pop up, to click on a clear call-to-action. As Dr. Robert Cialdini points out in his famous research on the psychology of persuasion, people want to act consistently with their prior choices. When consumers feel like they made a choice to opt in, they’ll take the content of your ad more seriously.
In the end, it comes down to KPIs. If what you’re trying to achieve with your campaign is the greatest possible number of impressions, then go ahead, I guess, roll on. If what you’re trying to do is make a good impression on your audience, and actually have them like you and want to engage with your brand in the end, there are far better ways of doing it than assaulting them with intrusive ads. Your audience is smart and discerning, and that means you should be, too.
(Also, if you’re a publisher, be up-front with your advertisers if you don’t think you’re going to be able to deliver on a contract, rather than just turning their campaign into the advertising equivalent of a teething, chain-smoking baby in a neon-green romper sitting next to you in coach. A little honesty means a lot.)