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AdTech is in denial. It’s shocking. Things are much worse than I imagined.

For example, Grant Le Riche, Managing Director for Canada for TubeMogul, says there’s too much fuss about ad-blocking: Ad Blocking Hype is Overblown. To keep things short, ad-blocking grew “only” 41% globally last year, but there’s no reason to worry because ad impressions available from *their* platform in Canada grew 275%.

Is he serious? If his company is doing fine, that’s good for them. But what does that have to do with the state of online advertising? And even if ad impressions had grown 275% globally, which is very unlikely, there would still be a huge problem: more impressions cannot make up for a smaller reach, especially if it’s the younger, more educated, more informed, heavy user crowd that is rushing to install ad-blockers.

Which, of course, is exactly what is happening.

But it gets worse: he apparently doesn’t understand that if the problem was caused by tracking and targeting, more tracking and more targeting is unlikely to be the solution:

Finally, as the quantity and quality of data used for audience targeting improves ad relevance and drives increased engagement, ad blockers’ popularity and prevalence should stabilize.

But, trust us, we would not stand by if it were a real problem. Right!

Not sure that creating a new web ads business that works is something that can be done, but there’s little doubt that Don Marti is right:

The same content can bring in an order of magnitude more ad revenue in print than online. In any other technology business, failing to keep up with 19th-century technology would be cause to reinvent things from the ground up. It’s time to apply the same standard to web ads, and not just protect the existing web ad business from ad blocking, but make a new web ad business that works.

The problem is: who is going to reinvent things from the ground up? Publishers don’t have a clue about how to do it. And the AdTech industry has no good reason to reinvent anything, because things are working just fine for them.

I wrote a short – and free! – Ebook about Online Advertising in which I asked…

Does Online Advertising work? The right question to ask would be: for whom does Online Advertising work? Does it work for Publishers? Does it work for Advertisers? Or does it just work for the Middlemen based in Silicon Valley?

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer thinks that you don’t know what you’re missing if you use an ad-blocker.

Pop-ups, huge ads, ads that din’t go away or trick me into clicking, animated Flash ads, audio-banners, and video ads that start on their own, especially if tied to my browsing history and what they think are my interests,

actually improve the experience of using the Web rather than hurt it.

Of course.

Without being tracked and having my data sold to the highest bidder and without ads all over the place, there is little doubt that my experience on the Web would be much worse. After all, that’s why I went online in the first place: to get targeted by ads. LOL.

We’ve known it for at least 15 years, but it’s nice to hear it from the IAB UK.

“Old banner ads aren’t working anymore.”

They never worked, but that’s good enough. Apparently, “native advertising” is the future. Native advertising accounts now for a quarter of all display advertising.

Great.

But what about those “old banner ads”, which account for about £1.31 billion on a total of £3.98 billion spent on digital advertisement in the first half of 2015 in the UK?

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Read: 15 Questions About Online Advertising. It’s for free.