With the prices of all the different services, you might as well get cable.
I don’t need a bunch of ads in my face…
This month, we are plugging the American Red Cross! Even if you can’t give blood, there are many other ways to help out. Visit https://www.redcross.org/ to find out how!
SOURCES
https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users
https://allaboutcookies.org/youtube-ad-blocker-crackdown-effects
https://phys.org/news/2010-08-survey-viewers-extent-tv-shifting.html
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes: https://www.themarketinggateway.com
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Do you like watching ads? I don’t unless it’s voluntary, and that might surprise you given the fact that I host a marketing podcast and work in a marketing profession.
But see, here’s the thing. I don’t have a problem with ads per se, and ads have long been an important reason broadcast media and online content have been able to be given away for free, but I do want to be able to have some control in whether or not I have to watch them when I’ve viewing television or movies that I paid for.
So if I’m watching my local ABC, NBC, CBS or Fox affiliate, ads don’t bother me a bit. I also sometimes check out brand campaigns on YouTube when I hear they’re particularly good because, hey, well-made ads can be entertaining and fun!
But if I’m paying $20-30 a month for a streaming on-demand video service and paying a premium because I don’t want my viewing to be interrupted by advertising, I’m not super happy about platform holders deciding that they need to show me ads anyway.
Especially during election season, where it feels like every political ad is going straight for my amygdala to put me in a state of fear.
So, like a lot of people, I switched from cable TV to internet-based entertainment a long time ago because I was tired of obnoxious advertising that felt like it was interrupting my shows and movies every few minutes.
The evolution of ads video on-demand streaming services has also gone from being optional to intrusive.
When services like Crackle and Tubi and Pluto.TV and Roku began offering free on-demand video supported by ads, I thought it was great because it meant there was a free alternative to paid services.
When YouTube began upping its ad placements in videos, I was relieved to realize that my old Google Play Music subscription, which I’ve had forever, had transformed over time into YouTube Premium and I wouldn’t be seeing ads in my YouTube content as a result.
When Amazon decided to introduce ads to its Prime Video service unless you paid for a $2.99 upgrade, I wasn’t too bothered because I barely watched anything on Prime Video anyhow.
When Netflix decided to launch an ad-supported tier after years of promising they never would, I sighed in relief because they were keeping the ad-free plans intact.
But when Disney+ updated its terms of service this week to allow ads to be played on all of their paid tiers, including the Hulu and Disney+ bundle that’s specifically ad-free, I got worried, because it suddenly felt like the very reason I’d moved to the internet for my entertainment was now bringing us back full circle to cable.
Except worse and more expensive.
So let’s talk about what’s happening with these on-demand services and what, if anything, can be learned from the situation.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
Before we dig into this topic, I might as well explain my basic philosophy of advertising, because I’ll readily accept that many marketers may be less conversative about this than I am.
Advertising intruding into our lives is not a new phenomenon, and if you study the history of advertising, you’ll find that for at least the last several hundred years, and quite likely before that in some cultures, people have used signage, printed flyers, events and various forms of media to advertise products or services.
But advertising as we know it today is linked very closely to the rise of mass media, starting with newspapers and magazines and then morphing into broadcast media and eventually the internet.
Advertising also shifted from a predominantly persuasive messaging strategy touting product features and benefits to more of a varied set of strategies intended to support different objectives.
Advertising was once highly focused on products, but it gradually began to focus on services as well. And some professions that used to have ethical prohibitions against advertising – mainly white-collar practice professions like lawyers and doctors – no longer have them, in large part thanks to the Supreme Court case Bates v. State Bar of Arizona and a later case between the American Medical Association and the FTC.
Political advertising, which was once a relatively minor nuisance, also has fewer prohibitions today thanks to Supreme Court decisions, which is why the airwaves are absolutely polluted with vicious attack ads every two years during a major election.
And this leads to my philosophy, which is that opportunities for advertising tend to start out small, like a pleasant creek running through a scenic forest, and then a stream that can provide a lot of utility for everyone. But unchecked, advertising channels can eventually turn into a deluge of floodwaters that simply can’t be controlled and which wash away everything that was worth seeing in the first place. The utility of advertising gets lost the deeper the waters become.
I’ll use public spaces as an example. In the past, you might have limited opportunities for outdoor advertising that were pretty much restricted to static signs, which means that they needed to be attractive and engaging while getting their messages across. This gradually led to billboards that could offer larger-than-life images and ideas as well as scrolling ticker signs that could depict moving words, and this gradually led to large screens that could depict movement and function like giant televisions.
Now, many public spaces are crowded with large screens full of moving images and carousels of ads, but the problem is that the basic utility of having some static information is lost because the ads are more focused on being eye-catching than actually providing useful content.
I’ve had many moments where I’ve caught an ad of interest to me out of the corner of my eye on a screen at a shopping mall or in a busy pedestrian area of a city and I’ve had to either wait for the particular information I want to see roll back around on the loop it’s on or I’ve just had to move on with my day, missing the actual information that was useful to me.
That’s the deluge that really benefits no one, and it creates a phenomenon known as “advertising blindness,” where people just tune out or skip ads not just because they’re annoying and intrusive, but because they’re not offering any real value.
And that brings me back to Disney+ and other streaming services, which are valuable to people because it allows them to enjoy content with or without ads, depending upon the pricing tier they’ve selected. Unlike cable TV, where viewers had a massive choice of channels but not schedules or programs, on-demand video lets them watch the content they want to watch when it’s convenient.
Most users have no problem with the lower-priced tiers being ad-supported because they’re willing to pay for the on-demand option but be a little inconvenienced so they can save a few bucks. That was never an option with cable, and that’s why these newer models are more successful as more and more people divest from cable TV plans.
But forcing ads on everyone, even the people who’ve elected to pay not to have to see them, involves giving up one of those key advantages of your platform. Even worse, it makes the advertising you show less appealing to your subscribers because they’re now annoyed by it and actively seeking ways to get around it or ignore it.
How can we be certain of this? Well, we have historical models. One of those is the internet itself. As the internet has evolved and ads have become more intrusive, ad blockers have become more common. According to research analyzed by Backlink, ad blocker utilization went from 44 million people worldwide in 2012 to 1.77 billion this year. That’s about 30% of internet users.
In other words, as free content went from having a reasonable number of digital ads to being inundated with them, an increasing number of people decided they would rather see none at all. And the most common reasons for installing an ad blocker? “There are too many ads” and “ads get in the way.”
Similarly, YouTube has been seeing a surge in ad blockers over the last few years, prompting the platform to ban them entirely.
Now remember, you can pay YouTube for a Premium account to remove ads being inserted into your content, so there is an ad-free way to watch the platform. But according to the website All About Cookies, which is about web traffic, not baked goods, only 12% of users would even consider doing that because most people have the perception that YouTube is free – 52% of users say they’ll never pay for YouTube content, and most of the remainder would only pay $10 or less to remove ads.
But in the same study, when users were asked what they’d do in response to YouTube’s recent ban on ad blockers, 22% said they’d still try to use an ad blocker, 16% said they’d spend less time on YouTube and 15% said they’d look for an ad-free alternative. Only 44% said they wouldn’t change their behavior.
If we want to go back further in time, we can also look at the old days of cable when digital video recorders, or DVRs, became commonplace about 20 years ago.
Research at the time found that about 2/3 of users skipped ads using “time-shifting” features at least some of the time, and unless they were invested in watching programs live – with sports, award shows, reality shows or appointment TV being the main reasons they would watch live – they were recording shows and watching them later, skipping ads entirely.
And again, this was largely because the ads didn’t provide any sort of value. They were noisy. They were uninteresting. They were repetitive. And they were often for products or services viewers didn’t care about.
This is what I mean when I saw that advertising tends to turn into a flood over time. And while we can all appreciate the beauty of a stream or even a river, flood waters are best avoided because they risk drowning us all.
And that’s why I’d recommend to Disney+ – whatever your plans are, even if you’re just going to show ads for your own programs, trailers for your own movies or those schmaltzy commercials for your theme parks and cruises, don’t force them on your paid users. Give them a way to opt out or, better yet, just don’t. Because they’re not going to reward you or your advertisers with attention and affect.
They’re just going to find them annoying and look for any opportunity to be rid of them, which may mean they get rid of you.
What I’d recommend instead is to consider the advertorial model where advertisers help fund programming in exchange for brand placement. It’s a tried and true revenue-generator, it’s generally only mildly annoying to viewers if they even care about it at all and it doesn’t cheapen their subscription enough to make them look for alternatives.
Plus, it can live for a very long time. For example, look at all the times Apple got its computers prominently placed in movies in the 1990s and 2000s – it creates the illusion that Apple notebook computers have always been the dominant brand despite being in a distant second to Windows machines during that period.
Apple’s long been savvy about creating the impression that its products are desirable, and it works when people see movie stars looking down and typing into Apple products.
Another way Disney+ could introduce advertising to its subscriber base is by offering exclusive programming that is DISTINCTLY ad-supported and making it clear from the title card that this content’s sponsored. Then, ensure the ads are integrated into the program and interesting enough for people to watch through.
Creating a reality show or sports format with this model would be even better because it would fit more closely with what viewers of those programs already expect.
Finally, maybe just consider backpedaling from these plans and owning up to it with subscribers. They could say, “We updated our terms of service, but due to your feedback, we will not be inserting ads to our ad-free tiers.” That would not admit defeat but rather, encourage people to trust them and maybe even sign up for those most expensive tiers, which I’d imagine is more profitable for them anyhow.
Whatever happens, the last thing anyone wants to see Disney+ do is reinvent cable TV where ads aren’t optional. And while I imagine some advertisers would jump at the chance to put their messages out to what they imagine are captive audiences, the smart ones will stay away from those waters, because they’re very likely to cause a flood before long.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been the Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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