Sourcepoint, a content compensation platform for publishers, found that 59% of their clients think that ad blockers provide a significant threat to their business. Media companies are not alone in their concerns. Small, large, and non-profit businesses alike are concerned about their ads not being seen. And for good reason. In September, with the new iOS9 update, Apple came out in support of ad blocking. Top apps in the Apple store now block advertisements.

This begs the question, if so many businesses are concerned about ad blockers, then what are marketers doing to circumvent the problem? In the simplest terms, the answer is native advertising. Native advertising is where the media matches the platform that the ads are placed on. For instance, a native ad on Instagram is beautiful photo that will seamlessly integrate with the user's newsfeed. However, as 2016 proceeds, it won't be enough just to post a native ad on Google. Here are some alternatives to consider.

Social Media

One tactic to avoiding ad blockers is to place media where ads are difficult to avoid, such as social media. eMarketer estimated that Google and Facebook alone accounted for more than half of all digital ad spending in 2015. This is partly attributed to pre-roll videos in their mobile news feeds. Pre-roll videos play automatically and are immune to ad blockers and almost impossible for the mobile user to avoid.

Target Alternative Media

People only want to see what they desire. Expectations in 2016 are that information will be pre-filtered out for them. It is incredibly important to run highly targeted ad campaigns in the coming year. Clorox is already ahead of the game. They shifted more than 40% of their media budget into highly-targeted digital ads.

Content Marketing

Expert content marketers will sway people towards their brands and objectives without ads and blatant sales pitches. Users get an improved experience and marketers still get their products and services in front of potential buyers. Most importantly, many forms of content marketing are not blocked by ad-blockers.

PQ Media estimates that content marketing currently equates to $67 billion of total ad spending in the U.S. This is significant because the TV market only has a slight edge at $70 billion. As marketers, we can count on content marketing to keep growing, while TV remains large and constant.

Read the full article from AdvertisingAge on what lies ahead for marketing and ad blockers here.

Need a to implement a new media buying and advertising strategy? Contact the Denver marketing experts at FiG Advertising + Marketing.