Originally published on LinkedIn on November 2, 2015

Online advertising today, especially for Millennials, is tough to endure. Intrusive, repetitive and stale ads line the perimeters of nearly every web page we visit. Using the Internet has turned into a digital game of “Operation,” where users “lose” the game any time they accidentally bump into ads that prevent them from doing what they want online.

"Everything you know about advertising — chuck it. It’s a completely different world and game with millennials."—Laura Desmond, CEO of the media agency the Starcom MediaVest Group said in an interview with the New York Times.

In an ideal world, advertisements would be fresh and seamlessly integrated into user experiences. Brands today have the ability to tell their stories through mediums that Don Draper could only dream about, but marketers and publishers—on average—are not capitalizing on these ad-tech breakthroughs. We, Millennials, are left with an unbearable result.

Let’s review some facts.

Fact 1: In 2014, $19.8 billion was spent on banner ads in the United States.

That means US marketers spent more on banner ads than Honduras’s GDP. I’m talking about banner ads — you know those ads on the edges of nearly every webpage that Millennials never, ever click purposefully. Industry standard CTRs for display advertising hovers around 0.06%, or less than 1 click per 1000 impressions. Given that the last time any Millennial purposefully clicked on a banner ad was...well, never...it’s concerning to see how much US marketers spend on this annoying and ineffective advertising platform.

Fact 2: A lack of advertising inventory for media publishers means we all see the same ads over and over again.

I recently caught up on some clips of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS.com, and before each clip the same 30-second pre-roll ad for the new Halo video game played. The same, exact ad. After the fourth video, I couldn’t bare to see another Halo ad, so I stopped watching (sorry Stephen). The repetition soured the once enjoyable experience.

This problem stems to many online media publishers, too. The Watch ESPN app has the same problem. So does Hulu. Millennials complained about hearing the same audio ad play on repeat on Spotify. Repeated ads ruin user experiences. We love publishers’ content, but not if it means brutally enduring repetitive advertising.

Fact 3: Most brands need Millennials.

Millennials are about one-fourth the nation’s population and have an estimated $1.3 trillion (or about 250 Donald Trumps) in annual buying power. As it currently stands, we don’t trust marketers at all—only about 6% of us actually consider online advertising to be credible (95% of us say our friends are the most credible source about product information).

Together, these facts create a dichotomy: marketers and publishers need millennials to make money, yet their content is annoying us and, more importantly, driving us away. Banner ads clutter user interfaces and ruin user experiences. Repeated ads drive us insane.

Enter ad blockers.

A report from PageFair and Adobe found that as of June 2015 there were 45 million ad blocking monthly active users in the US. That figure is even higher in Europe, where 77 million are using ad blocking technologies.

At the global level, this trend is growing rapidly. That same study found a 41% YoY growth in the number of monthly active ad blocking users, and currently, advertisers expect to lose $21.8 billion due to ad blocking. That billion dollar figure is before mobile ad blocking goes mainstream (Apple just permitted the use of mobile ad blocking apps with its release of iOS 9).

With three important changes to the way advertising is done, I believe marketers and publishers can stop frustrating Millennials and begin to win back the money they're losing to ad blockers:

Change 1: No more banner ads.

No matter how beautiful a banner ad may be or how “slightly elevated” the most recent campaign’s CTR is from the industry average, marketers must stop spending money on banner ads as they only frustrate those who accidentally click on them or get ignored. Marketers should reallocate their spend from ineffective banner ads. Build a better product. Pursue a native ad. Please stop spending $19.8B on ads that don’t work and are widely hated.