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Who has the legitimacy to set the standard for what is or is not an acceptable ad?

It was a question pondered recently at Marketing Magazine’s Ad-Tech Canada conference in Toronto, during a sometimes tense panel about ad blocking (and how marketers should respond to the practice) featuring representatives of Adblock Plus, ad-block measurement company PageFair and ad-tech company TubeMogul.

Already, some estimates suggest nearly 200 million people run ad blockers around the world on desktop browsers. IAB Canada assigns blame to ad blocking for a 30% decline in Canadian ad traffic.

Adblock Plus, whose browser extension has been downloaded more than 300 million times, has a solution, argued Ben Williams, communications and operations manager for Eyeo, the Cologne, Germany-based parent company of Adblock Plus.

It has introduced so-called “acceptable ads” – ones that do not disrupt the user’s experience, are clearly labelled as ads and are not too large – and “whitelists” publishers that meet their criteria.

Williams, speaking via a video link, said that his company wants to give control of the “acceptable ads” criteria to an “independent body” by the end of this year.

However, Adblock Plus has been roundly criticized by advertisers and publishers for taking a 30% cut of revenue generated on some larger “whitelisted” sites.

Because of that, Dr. Johnny Ryan, Head of Ecosytem at PageFair (which has developed software to identify ad blocking technology) argued that an ad blocking company cannot be part of the solution.

“You have a successful, well-funded company that has a toll bridge between publishers and consumers and… has introduced a new single point of failure to the ad infrastructure and we don’t know who they are charging, for what,” he said. “You can’t have a conversation of legitimate stakeholders facilitated by the people who caused the problem.”

Williams and Ryan, as well as Dana Toering, Managing Director of TubeMogul, were in agreement that ad blocking wasn’t going away and that Internet advertising, in its current form, needed to evolve.

“For 20 years nobody gave a damn about the consumer and the consumer has now bit back” Ryan said. “The genie is not going back in the bottle.

“The question is what do we do for the next 20 years?”

That question wasn’t answered at the conference but it appears there is movement toward a solution that provides a great user experience for consumers while bringing value to advertisers.

Dr. Ryan, at least, believes ad blocking may provide an opportunity for a “historic do-over” because they remove clutter from the page and offer a potential blank slate for great creative.

“We have the technology to put the ads back but we have to decide what goes back. When you can decide, in an entirely de-cluttered [space], what ads publishers should show consumers, you have an opportunity to radically increase profit.”