The U.K. mobile operator, Three, announced on Friday new strategies to ban advertising from mobile devices. The company argues that advertisers should pay for data charges when sending alerts. It is planning to contact 500,000 customers to offer them a 24-hour trial of the ad-blocking technology.
According to the telecommunications provider, “current mobile advertising model is broken”. Three said that customers complain about “irrelevant and intrusive” ads, which trigger data consumption and track people by using cookies, sometimes without their consent.
Three has made some new proposals for its utopic advertising model. The company said that customers should not pay for data fees to receive ads such as photographs and videos. Instead costs “should be borne by the advertiser”, added the operator.
A second proposal suggests that privacy and security of users should be the top priority. According to Three, there are advertisers using mobile ads to obtain data from devices, without notifying owners.
Arvind Narayanan, Professor of Computer Science at Princeton, explained that ad tracking companies collect data from users and classify information into categories, in order to offer “personalized products”.
A third point proposed by Three said that customers should receive adverts, according to their proper interests. Instead, their experience might be affected by “excessive, intrusive, unwanted or irrelevant adverts,” said the company in a press release issued Friday.
Three CMO: “The current ad model frustrates customers, eats up their data allowance and can jeopardize their privacy.”
The company has called advertisers, brands, and publishers to jointly create a new system, to offer a less intrusive experience. It also presented a new technology to filter advertising “that damages the mobile browsing experience” of users.
An estimated 500,000 people would be contacted soon by the operator, to be asked if they want to be part of a 24-hour free trial of the ad-blocking technology. It is expected to take place during the second week of June.
Customers can also request to be part of the program at the Three UK website. Tom Malleschitz, Chief Marketing Officer at the company said that this new strategy seeks to offer a “better” experience of mobile advertising to customers.
“Something needs to change. We can only achieve change by working with all stakeholders in the advertising industry – customers, advertising networks, and publishers – to create a new form of advertising that is better for all parties,” said Malleschitz on Friday.
According to a report issued by PageFair, Ad-blocking cost an estimated $22 billion to publishers during 2015. Approximately 198 million users have already acquired some type of ad-blocking technology.
Just in the U.K. 15 percent of adults are currently using ad-blocking technologies, said the Internet Advertising Bureau. Ad-blocking networks are capable of filtering adverts based on “whitelists” that would charge fees to enter in.
Google announced a similar strategy last month: Is personalized advertising the new trend to be followed by tech companies?
During April’s meeting of the National Association of Broadcaster, Google introduced personalized TV ads with DoubleClick Dynamic Ad Insertion. It would make advertising “hyper-relevant” for viewers, said Daniel Alegre, president of global partnerships at the company.
The DoubleClick technology would make sure that two competitors don’t appear in the same commercial break. Google also plans to offer congruent content. For instance, a children’s cereal ad won’t follow an alcohol ad.
Source: Three U.K. Press Release