Marketers Face Growing Consumer Efforts To Avoid Ads

Consumer packaged goods companies are trying to find ways of maximizing marketing efficiency when consumers are doing their best to avoid advertisements. For example, Unilever spends $7.7 billion on advertising worldwide and another $15 million to protect that investment by working with marketing-technology startups through its Foundry program. In the United States, the Great Recession and economic policy changes have battered the middle class, pushing more people into the lower class. Clorox shifted more than 40 percent of its media spending to digital marketing, which uses programmatic media, to serve most relevant ads to consumers. Also, marketers are putting their ad spending into media where ads are harder to avoid, such as sports and other live TV programs.