Can ad biz’s LEAN avert ADPOCALYPSE?

How acceptable is an ad?

Do you trust the ad industry to clean up its act? It certain has an incentive to do so, with adblocking on the rise. Six months ago the ad biz trade association the IAB launched the LEAN initiative to define a basemark “acceptable ad”.

The IAB's LEAN principles are “Light, Encrypted, AdChoices-supporting, and Non-invasive”. The initiative implicitly recognises that consumers find many ads intrusive and annoying – and resent that they soak up precious mobile metered data packages. Auto-streaming video ads, hard-to-dismiss popups and follow-me bubbles are all annoying examples of the pestilence that plagues readers on both desktop and mobile. The IAB is brutally honest about these failings, writing:

“... our scraping of dimes may have cost us dollars in consumer loyalty. The fast, scalable systems of targeting users with ever-heftier advertisements have slowed down the public internet and drained more than a few batteries. We were so clever and so good at it that we over-engineered the capabilities of the plumbing laid down by, well, ourselves.  This steamrolled the users, depleted their devices, and tried their patience.”

At the same time, the ad revenue is vital to a diverse publishing ecosystem. Without advertising, many sites would increase the proportion of advertorial or “native content" to stay afloat, peppering the copy with exhortations to drink Pepsi or cure erectile dysfunction.

Two significant developments in the LEAN world took place last week. “Acceptable” is a highly subjective term, so the IAB is developing metrics to make this quantifiable. The goal, in its own words, is to develop a “roster of criteri[a] to establish the algorithms for a rating system that will provide a clear overview of which digital destinations and advertising campaigns offer the strongest user experiences.”

The intention is to wrestle the initiative from the likes of Eyeo, the company set up to commercialise Ad Block, which has begun to let through advertisements it deems “acceptable”. But you had to pay the gatekeeper Eyeo before it could make the judgement call. Thus Eyeo found itself described by Culture Minister John Whittingdale as operating a “modern day protection racket”.

The first results were unveiled last week. LEAN wants establish a clear verifiable scorecard for “acceptability” by the end of the calendar year.

One company following developments closely is Opera, which released an ad-blocker in its Mini browser last week. Deputy CTO Bruce Lawson told us that real metrics that determined “how light is light” were very valuable. Those could potentially establish a baseline for what gets through.

For now, Opera is crowing about how useful its ad-blocker is, even though it is turned off by default.

The bandwidth gobbled up by ads may not be a pressing first world problem, but it is in developing countries, where mobile data is a luxury. According to one estimate, a 500MB mobile data bundle costs a German an hour’s average salary, but in Brazil, that 500MB takes 34 hours to earn at the average wage. Mini’s ad blocker on average uses 14 per cent less data and speeds up page loads by 40 per cent.

For all that, Lawson said Opera didn’t want to turn the blocker on by default so as not to skew the market.

LEAN probably wouldn’t have happened without the rise in ad-blocking, and it is an attempt by advertising to clean up its act. If it is successful, ad blockers and browsers could have three settings: block all, block unacceptable, and block none.

For more on how LEAN’s metrics are evolving, see here.

Curing the adtech biz of other nasties might be more difficult. So complex is the digital ad chain, the complexity hides fraud, including malvertising. ®