By Giles Goodwin, CEO of creative management platform Flite

Even as marketers spend $3.71 billion on programmatic media buys this year, consumers’ eyeballs remain elusive. Major players like Apple have introduced ad blockers for devices that effectively allow consumers to ignore pricey display ads.

More widespread ad blockers come as good news to anyone who’s ever been chased around the Internet for months with the same static retargeting ad after a careless product click. The rampant use of ad blockers should also send a message to marketers: robotic retargeting is creating an adversarial relationship with consumers.

We should be doing much better. With the rise of retargeting, it is theoretically possible for brands to communicate one-on-one with each consumer—a marketer’s dream. So, what’s the problem?

We squander that opportunity with annoying, uncreative ads that become white noise, and are barely more targeted than the 30-second spots that play on TV.

To get rid of ad blockers, marketers need to get personal. They must adopt a data-informed,  rich media  approach that easily targets ad copy and images at individual consumers. And they must do it soon, before users’ patience with online advertising wears even thinner.

Truly Targeted Content

This dynamic approach to serving creative goes by many names, including “creative programmatic,” “creative-side platform” or “creative management platform” (CMP), which is my preferred term. However, no matter what you call it, the idea behind the technology remains the same: using software automation to optimize creative messaging for user preference, time, location, and device.

For example, YouTube recently used a CMP to tailor ads for YouTube Comedy Week, a series of live comedy events. To grab users’ attention, the company partnered with DoubleClick studios to create an interactive ad whose message changed depending on the user’s language, location, and even their country’s collective sense of humor. The result was something much less like a banner ad or TV spot, and much more like a personalized note.

It’s not hard to see what an improvement this is in terms of user experience. Users saw a message that reflected a deep understanding of their tastes and preferences, rather than a crass scrape of their browser histories. They also got information that was uniquely relevant to their own place and time (each ad displayed the lineup for the festival in that user’s particular city). In short: it’s the kind of ad that could actually have a chance at convincing users to turn off their ad blockers, if only it were a little more widespread.

Ads that Build Relationships

Better user experience can also improve marketers’ experiences. Rising rates of banner blindness have made advertising online frustrating for them, too. Gone are the days when they could simply serve an ad hoping people would click through to a website and effortlessly fall down the purchase funnel. Brands now have about three seconds to grab the audience’s attention, if that audience sees their ads at all. Clicking through to an outside website is really too much to hope for. Instead, marketers need to engage users—and create conversions—within the ad itself.

CMPs work for this because they provide an interactive canvas for branded storytelling. Their complex interfaces allow users to move down the purchase funnel within the ad instead of sending them through to a separate site. Consumers don’t have to stop what they’re doing to give brands attention, which makes ads feel less interruptive and more conversational. It’s a first step toward a positive relationship between consumers and marketers—far different from the adversarial relationship that leads to ad blocking.

Many more of the world’s biggest (and savviest) brands are already working to leverage data-driven specificity for stronger, more user-friendly content. For example, Microsoft recently partnered with RevJet to test CMP ads on students. Contrary to the hypothesis of the test—that images featuring a Microsoft product would get the most attention—the study actually found the opposite to be true. Color blocked ads featuring text and no product photos received the most attention. Once that determination was made, it was much easier to serve creative that users wanted to see, helping the bottom line and building relationships at the same time.

New Creative, New Testing

Of course, as the message gets more sophisticated, so does the testing. CMPs allow marketers to create different variants inside the platform and having them auto-optimize for different demographics. This is one of the greatest untapped strengths of CMPs—they can be used to run a test like Microsoft’s inside the ad itself.

This is the wave of the future. As users toggle from screen to screen, marketers have to think of building long-term relationships with consumers, not short-term campaigns. And they have to do so with every tool at their disposal. CMPs, and the rigorous testing they enable, are readily available as the next arrow in our quiver.

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