What To Do When The Customers Blocking Ads Are the Ones You Want to Reach

Ad blockers are not just a technical issue. They are a planning issue, especially when the people most likely to block ads look a lot like the audiences many brands most want to reach. In Canada, this is already mainstream behaviour: MTM reports that roughly one-third of online Canadians use ad blockers, particularly younger internet users. GWI's global profile makes the commercial tension even clearer: regular ad-blocker users skew male, urban, digitally fluent, and are most commonly 25-34; affluent consumers are also 14% more likely than average to block ads regularly. In other words, ad blocking is not happening off to the side of the market. It is happening among high-value, media-aware consumers with the money, tools, and motivation to filter out advertising that does not feel worth their attention.

The instinct may be to treat this as a reach problem, but the better read is that it is an experience problem. People are not necessarily rejecting brands; they are rejecting friction. GWI reports that the top reasons people use ad blockers are practical and experience-led: 63% say there are too many ads, 53% say ads disrupt what they are trying to do, and 41% cite privacy. Privacy matters, but irritation is often what pushes people to act. The Coalition for Better Ads reaches a similar conclusion from the format side, identifying experiences like pop-ups, autoplay video with sound, prestitial ads, high ad density, flashing animation, and large sticky ads as the kinds of formats most likely to fall below consumer acceptability and push people toward blocking.

So what do you do when the customers blocking ads are the ones you want to reach? You stop treating one channel as the whole plan. Browser-based blockers can weaken display, programmatic, retargeting, website video, and the tracking signals that support attribution, but those same consumers are still watching, listening, searching, subscribing, scrolling, shopping, and engaging in places where the value exchange is clearer. In Canada, Roku reports that 9 in 10 Canadian TV streamers use ad-supported streaming, and that the share reachable by in-stream ads rose to 85% in 2025. That is the opportunity: build a media mix that does not depend too heavily on the most blockable inventory, then pair it with creative that avoids the behaviours that caused blocking in the first place. Use premium video, creator partnerships, podcasts, newsletters, sponsorships, search, social, retail media, and traditional channels to create more ways in - and make the creative useful, contextual, respectful of frequency, and native to the environment. The goal is not to force ads around the blocker. It is to earn attention in places where people are still willing to give it.