How often we have got annoyed with unwanted pop-up ads when we just opened a website on safari or a video starts pre-playing with sound before you can click or read anything. Or maybe you’re shopping for a mobile or a pair of spectacles—which then follow you around the internet in display ads for the next few weeks.

Popups and video auto-plays are intrusive, and it has become a  challenge for site visitors to close the popup or pause the video. Similarly, display ads based on your search history aren’t always applicable to what you actually want. These annoying ad experiences are rampant on the internet, but the good news for users is browsers are finally addressing user’s issues and  developers are doing something about it.

Since the dawn of the internet, web browsers have simply served as a portal to the web and have done little to limit, filter, or change the content, outside of blocking malicious sites and preventing popup windows. But since Marketers are constantly innovating ways to broadcast their messages and reach customers, marketing tactics have become more intrusive into our web browsing experience. Some websites rely on ad revenue and have been slow to act against the advertising tactics and experiences many consumers have grown to find annoying. That’s why the creators of some of the most popular web browsers, Apple and Google, have announced they are adding ad-blocking technology to their browsers.

Apple’s Safari and developments

Apple recently announced at their Worldwide Developer Conference that Safari’s newest update will not only block auto-playing videos, but will also start Intelligent Tracking Prevention to directly target ad trackers. Intelligent Tracking Prevention will cut back on cross-site tracking and third party cookies. In the recent survey conducted by apple , they found that  popular websites had as many as more than 70  such trackers, all silently collecting data on users for days and weeks after users visit their website. Lot of users  feel like an invasion of their privacy.

For Digital Marketers, the situation has turned out to be little trickier. Remarketing campaigns function by placing a third-party cookie on a user’s computer when they visit a website. Later, when surfing other websites with available ad placements on a display network, the ad-serving scripts recognizes the cookie from the original website, and that means the script is more likely to display an ad featuring products from the original site. Intelligent Tracking Prevention won’t eliminate this tracking completely. It will still allow these third-party cookies to function, but only for 24 hours after the original visit. These cookies will then be fully purged from the system after 30 days.

It will be incredibly interesting to see the direct impact that this change will have on advertisers who rely heavily on remarketing tactics. It appears that Safari’s new system would only allow retargeting ads to be served for 24 hours following a visit.

Safari seems to be taking a direct shot at the successful remarketing tactics used by Google, Facebook and other various platforms. Marketers who target using remarketing are going to have to adjust their remarketing strategy on Safari placements to tailor to this change. The window of available time that passes before serving an ad specifically on Safari could drop from a wide, long-term window to 24 hours and could have a major impact on the messaging strategy required for this audience of users.

What Can Digital Marketers Do About All This?

Consumers have been complaining that internet ads slow down the web experience. When two of the most popular internet browsers available are adding ad-block features, it’s a clear sign consumers want this functionality. In fact, people have been turning to third-party software to ease the annoyance of marketing messages. Use of desktop ad blockers grew by 17% last year. In total, ad blocker software has been installed on over 615 million devices, both desktop, and mobile.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t run ads, but what you should do is get ahead of these browser restrictions by seeing if you’re using any of the least preferred ad experiences from the Initial Better Ad Standards. The Coalition for Better Ads uses cross-industry expertise and consumer insight to create new global standards for online advertising that better addresses consumers wants and expectations of advertisers.

According to one of the popular websites  avoid the following types of ads:

For marketers, what we can do is what we should always do:

Be approachable. Be likeable. Be helpful. But please, don’t be overwhelming. Consumers don’t want to be force-fed content, and it’s up to us to honour that. So rather than using a blanket display ad campaign that indiscriminately serves a large scroll over ad, try using custom audiences to target the specific job titles or characteristics you want to do business with or who may already be interested in what you’re offering. Serve up a video on your page, but don’t set it to autoplay—a viewer who didn’t want to watch isn’t really engaging with you anyway. Or take the flashing elements out of your animated ads, as readers find the flash—but not the movement—particularly annoying.

Ultimately, changes like this serve as a reminder that good marketing isn’t just about what you want to say—it’s about what your customers want to hear.

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