A prominent UK commercial broadcaster suspected that a growing proportion of their viewers were using ad block tools to avoid seeing adverts when watching online.

This trend was concerning as advertising is the primary source of income for non-subscription-based commercial broadcasters and online content publishers. The advent of ad blockers (plugins a user installs in their web browser to block known URLs serving advertising content) could threaten the perceived value of commercial agreements with advertisers. Over time, this would threaten to reduce the broadcaster’s available income through this medium.

The broadcaster suspected the issue, having observed an increase in ad failures: where the website flags that an advert failed to load or was not watched to completion. They wanted to do something about the issue but needed help figuring out how to proceed.

Collaborating with a cross-discipline team of engineers, customer care and ad-operations specialists, the product manager asked me to devise an approach to investigate the problem and reduce ad errors towards normal levels.

Sensitivity was important as one of the broadcaster’s largest demographics was older viewers who, if watching online, might have ad block software unknowingly installed on their behalf by family members. Too sudden a change or too blunt a message could risk alienating that demographic, or causing unwanted media attention for the broadcaster.

Bringing the working group together, I started to build a picture of the problem. I held workshops to surface our knowledge, concerns and questions about the situation and respond as more information became available.

Critical questions at the start included:

• What do we know about the problem? (Gathering measurable data, statistics and facts.)
• What do we think? (Opinions, hunches, feelings about what might be happening.)
• What could we do? (Constructive suggestions, everything we think we could try.)
• What risks does this involve? (What could go wrong?)

Using this information, we created a simple, adaptable approach to tackle the problem, allowing us to iterate as we learned more.

In practice, our phases looked like this:

1) Gathering data.

• To ensure a more reliable picture of the problem, we surfaced potential issues that could explain increased ad errors and made changes to gather more data.

2) Improve data clarity.

• Having analysed the results of the first phase, we made minor changes and collected more information. 
• At the end of this iteration, we wanted an accurate picture of how many users regularly block adverts.

3) Show soft messaging to the user.

• This first stage in communicating the issue to viewers involved showing a message to any users we suspected of blocking ads. 
• Messaging was deliberately soft (e.g. “we suspect you may be using ad blocking software”), and users could still click through to view their programme. 

4) Slightly harder messaging. Respond to false positives. 

• Collaboration with customer care meant that we could collaborate with viewers who had complained but were not knowingly blocking adverts. This was essential in helping improve the detection quality by reducing false positives. 
• We adjusted the messaging to inform that, within a specific timeframe, we would block users from watching shows where we suspected they were circumventing the adverts. 

5) Block viewing completely

• By this stage, the tooling was accurate enough to detect when viewers were blocking ads in the shows they were watching. 
• Such viewers were given harder messaging explaining how the broadcaster is funded and asking them to disable the ad block software if they wanted to continue watching the shows they loved. 

The approach I created enabled the broadcaster to take a hard stand over a critical threat to their funding model, while also dealing with potential false positives in a sensitive and adaptable way.

An extra benefit of the project was that the website’s advert-serving functionality improved overall quality. Closer working between engineering and ad operations surfaced previously undetected bugs.

Overall, the number of failed adverts rolled back towards normal levels as hoped. The project was deemed a big success.

Shortly after the last phase was completed, commercial competitors contacted the broadcaster. They held talks to share ideas and discuss a common approach to ad block detection in the sector, helping them see off a common threat.

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