Fox’s digital ad boss wants you to use an ad blocker
Digital ads suck, and they broke the internet, digital ad exec Joe Marchese says on Recode Media.
The guy in charge of the ads you see on the web for Fox content — ranging from “Empire” to “Atlanta” to the Super Bowl — wants you to install an ad blocker.
Speaking on the latest episode of Recode Media with Peter Kafka, Joe Marchese said companies like Fox can see when you come to their sites or to Hulu with an ad blocker turned on. It’s then up to those content providers to react to that fact, and Marchese sees blockers as an important signal of what consumers think of ads.
“No one likes the deal advertising is giving them right now,” Marchese said. “No one wants to be interrupted 10 times or see a 30-second pre-roll to get access to a one-minute clip.”
“Advertising used to be, ‘this entire program [is] brought to you by brand X,’” he added. “We started to break it down into more units, and the pricing became so depressed, in this current state, that the deal for the advertiser, the consumer and the content isn’t fair any more.”
Marchese, who came to Fox after selling it his interactive ad company, TrueX, in 2015, suggested that people who do turn on ad blockers in their web browsers can then choose to whitelist certain sites that they trust and are willing to see ads for. However, he believes a general reset of online advertising is necessary and likened digital ads to subprime mortgages pre-2008.
“What do I need to deliver a message?” he asked. “I need time, and then ideally I need either sight or sound, or both, and the newest interaction. Time, sight, sound and interaction. I would guess that a mountain of impressions that are bought today have a near-zero chance of getting that attention.”
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
