How Google is Changing Public's Opinion on Advertising

Google's new hub called My Ad Center now allows consumers of media to control what type of ad they want to see on their devices. This filter is an effort to shift public sentiment towards advertising to a more positive light.

(Image from https://chromeunboxed.com/google-my-ad-center-io2022-announcement)

Background: Truthfully speaking, the public’s sentiment towards advertising is not great to say the least. Advertising overall has a bad rep which can mostly be attributed to bad media planning on the advertisers side.

How many times have you seen a ad where you can't wait for the 5 second countdown to be over with in order to skip a video ad? Probably too many to count.

How many times have you visited a website only to be bombarded with one to many display ads and can't find the small cross to close the ad? Probably also too many to count...

When it comes to advertising, advertisers use two approaches when targeting consumers in advertising:

1. Plan. Good ads are planned right. There is a lot of research that goes into targeting the right customers. Segmenting is one of them. When you have enough data to group your customers based on their purchase behavior, you are more likely to convert many customers by placing the right product in front of the right customer.

2. What plan? These ads are the ones we are oftentimes bombarded with and can't seem to get away from (what will I do with a phone car mount when I don't own a car?!). It can be easy to get carried away and generalize your consumers but what this does it usually just adds more oil to the fire. People don’t like being shown unnecessary products and tabs popping up on their devices so now with Google allowing Chrome users to control their own ads in their My Ad Center, it may become harder to reach potential customers than ever before.

However, this new feature by Chrome may not be so bad after all.

According to Insider Intelligence, the allowing of choosing what ads to see and what ads not to see, Google hopes to “both improve consumer sentiment toward advertising and help those ad reach the most relevant audience.”

Although this may sound hopeful since you might expect users to block all ads if they had the chance, but sometimes being advertised a product you are searching without much effort might not be so bad.