Editor’s note: Jennifer Sikora is chief marketing officer at CivicScience, a Pittsburgh-based research firm.
Mobile ad blocking is no doubt going to be watched very closely by marketers, advertisers and mobile product developers as they assess how quickly and extensively consumers will adopt this option. With both CivicScience and Pew Research data putting smart-phone usage now at over 64 percent in the U.S., the growing opportunity to use these devices as a vehicle for marketing reach is now being threatened with easier access to ad blocking technology.
Headlines about this topic were back in the spotlight early summer 2015, with Apple’s announcement that its next iOS and OS X operating system versions will make it easier to develop ad-blocking extensions to Apple’s Safari Web browser.
Will marketers need to rethink mobile strategies, given that eMarketer estimates that mobile ad spending will exceed the $100 billion mark in 2016?
We ran a poll (from June 23-July 13, 2015) to study 6,500 U.S. adult consumers based on their likeliness to install a mobile ad blocker. While the top-line results suggest that 41 percent of U.S. adults who own a mobile device are “very likely” to install ad-blocking software (a potentially worrisome statistic on the surface), we actually found a more optimistic narrative as we took a deeper look at the profiles of response groups.
It turns out that those who said they are not at all likely to install ad blocking for their smart phone or tablet device have much heavier levels of mobile device and app usage than the other respondents. It may be fair to call them mobile power users.
Brands that target younger consumers should be pleased to know that non-blockers are 38 percent more likely to be under the age of 25 and 33 percent more likely to be 25-29. Also, women are a bit less inclined to say they are “very likely” to install a mobile ad blocker.
Beyond the basic demographics, though, is where the true picture emerges. Those who say they’re “not at all likely” to install ad blocking are more likely than average to use their mobile device for many different types of activities and transactions. They are:
- seventy-seven percent more likely than the rest of the respondents to say they use their phone to make mobile payments;
- fifty-six percent more likely to conduct over half of their retail banking using their mobile device;
- sixty-two percent more likely to use their smart phone very frequently to research products they want to purchase;
- fifty-two percent more likely to say they primarily use texting over phone calls, social media or e-mail to communicate most often with friends and family;
- sixty-five percent more likely to play the majority of their video games on their mobile device vs. other game play options; and
- twenty-one percent more likely to second screen – meaning that when watching TV, they are also viewing mobile apps, games or other content not related to the show.
In addition to mobile device usage differences, the data also show that those not likely to install mobile ad blocking are 25 percent more likely to feel that their personal financial situation will get better in the next six months, and they are 16 percent more likely than the average respondent to be currently employed. This suggests that mobile power users are more likely to be an economically stable audience for advertisers to reach.
The mobile power user is going to be far less inclined to block ads on their devices, while those more likely to install ad blocking represent a less mobile-engaged user-base. Such research insights can help marketers and advertisers as they revisit their mobile spend strategies, knowing that they still will have a receptive, and perhaps higher-quality consumer audience on the other side.
Methodology
CivicScience collects real-time consumer research data via polling applications that run on U.S.publisher Web sites, cycling through thousands of active questions on any given day. Respondents for this report were weighted for U.S. Census representativeness for gender and age, 13 years and older, and data was collected from 6,516 non-incented opt-in respondents answering poll sessions from June 23, 2015 through July 13, 2015.