Anyone that browsed a mobile site only to be greeted with an intrusive pop-up advertisement that fills their entire screen will admit to the anger and frustration it can cause. A modern tale of cat and mouse quickly ensues.

The harder you try to close the ad by clicking the X with your finger on a tiny screen, you merely end up opening the link instead and end up at a destination that was not of your choosing. Elsewhere, there is a marketing manager delighted by the automated and AI driven report that suggest their campaign has been a fantastic success.

The inconvenient truth is those high impressions or click through ratios are very often meaningless. A negative experience with any brand could prevent a customer from every doing business with them again. This was perfectly highlighted by entrepreneur, Gary Vaynerchuk who used his frustration to reveal why he would never buy another Samsung product. Now that web mobile web browsing has overtaken desktop, it’s time to admit that many aspects of the internet are in a desperate need of a 21st-century upgrade. The current method of delivering ads in a mobile-first world is broken, and digital natives have learned to tune out of marketing messages.

Deep down, we all understand that high-quality journalism comes at a price. Most publications are heavily reliant on advertising revenue to pay their content creators. But when we consume content, most of us will readily admit to the sheer frustration caused by intrusive advertisements. Many are currently leading double lives and can be heard announcing the evils of pop-up blockers in the corporate world, but sneakily using them to block ads during their personal browsing sessions.

Maybe, these are just a few of the reasons why Google recently advised they were building a better web for everyone. There appears to be a universal realisation that annoying, irrelevant and intrusive advertising practices have no place in the digital world.

In an age dominated by the personalisation of almost everything, only useful and relevant ads will tempt users to lower the settings of their pop-up blockers. News that Google will soon block ads that don’t play by the rules was a much-needed wake-up call that the advertising industry needs to be rebuilt to hold any relevance to tech-savvy audiences.

Google is attempting to protect their future business model for obvious reasons such as the fact that the majority of its revenue derives from advertising. The Coalition for Better Ads has already developed an initial Better Ads Standards, but it won’t be until Google enforces these rules that marketers will be forced to play by the rules.