After a few minutes of listening to her curse, I steeled myself against her wrath (which was causing our dogs to cower) and asked if I could offer assistance. She dialed down her fluster long enough to reload the website and show me the problem. On the screen, the site began to resolve, then it turned gray to highlight an ad window spreading over the center of the page.

The ad opened just long enough to announce a car dealership’s brand before both the ad and the browser behind it vanished, leaving me looking at neat rows of apps on the iPad’s desktop.

“This is just a bunch of …,” my wife said, followed by yet another string of epithets that made me want to join the dogs in hiding. “I need to review the morning story placement, and I can’t even get to the site!”

In separate situations, I witnessed similar exasperation recently from people at a Starbucks, at a mall food court, and in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. Little else sends Americans into paroxysms of agitation quite like the intrusion of advertising into our online reverie. And yet digital publishers express surprise and concern at the latest surge in ad blocking software revealed by PageFair and Adobe Systems, Inc. in “The 2015 Ad Blocking Report,” published this week.

PageFair, headquartered in Ireland, provides solutions to detect and measure ad blockers. Adobe is one of Perficient’s Strategic Partners. The report they produced examines per-country and per-state information on ad-block usage, as well as monthly active user statistics, and it found that – surprise! – web users are ratcheting up their use of ad-blocking software.

In the past year, ad blocker usage rose 41 percent in the United States and 35 percent in Europe to encompass a total of 200 million web users worldwide. In some nations in Europe, the report said, a third of users employed ad-blocking tools. Here, in states such as California, New York, and Oregon, around 15 percent of users regularly blocked web ads.

Those numbers translate into heavy damage on corporate profit margins, the report said. PageFair and Adobe estimate that U.S. firms alone lost almost $6 billion in revenue last year because their digital ad efforts were not reaching intended targets. The loss is likely to climb north of $10 million by the end of 2015.

PageFair and Adobe define ad blocking as any solution that acts like a firewall between web browsers and ad servers. Most ads are blocked or deflected by end users using solutions that target extensions such as “adblock” or “adblock plus.”

Naturally, online marketers are alarmed by all this blocking. It means their carefully crafted sales pitches – intended to supplant the evaporating influence of print publishing – are disappearing into the digital ether.

“(The) existential threat of ad blocking has become a pressing issue in the board rooms of publishers across the world,” the report said. “A concentrated response is required, founded upon a renewed focus on user experience and enabled by secure ad-serving technology.”

The key words here are “user experience,” or UX – the defining element of success in 2015. Connected technology has matured well past the convenience stage to become essential in the livelihoods of consumers as well as companies, but consumers, not companies, are driving this evolution. Proliferate smart technology and social networking have empowered consumers; now, they can choose to engage companies at multiple levels.

If companies hamper this empowerment, or compromise the UX with excessive ads, slower page loading speeds, intrusive auto-play videos, and the surreptitious downloads of uninvited promotions carrying potential privacy threats, the companies risk losing engagement.

And that affects the entire web.

“As technology develops and ad-blocking plug-ins become more commonplace, the growth in ad-blocking usage will receive yet another catalyst,” the PageFair/Adobe report said. “This has the potential to challenge the viability of the web as a platform for the distribution of free, ad-supported content.”

Presently, the web browsers Firefox and Google Chrome are responsible for most end-user ad blocking; however, the mobile market is making strides in this direction. Developers are busy making plug-ins for smartphone web browsers, and Apple’s pending iOS 9 will include support for ad-blocking apps.

The iOS 9 platform is due to release in September. Afterward, we can expect ad-block numbers to soar and more publishers to panic – and I can expect my spouse’s cursing to subside.

Shantanu Narayen, president and chief executive officer of Adobe. (Photo courtesy of Adobe/CNN)

“Ultimately, when you do the right thing for the customer, everything falls into place.”

Wise words for any enterprise, but particularly for those now considering digital transformation. And the speaker should know.

Shantanu Narayen, president and chief executive officer of Adobe Systems, Inc., one of Perficient’s Strategic Partners, led his company through one of the most notable transformations ever witnessed in the corporate world. He is credited with lifting a company famous for digital publishing off of the desktop and into the cloud, then selling online subscriptions to Adobe’s market-dominant products such as InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop so customers could reach into that cloud.

Criticism rained hard on Narayen for doing this, in part because cloud computing was still elbowing its way into contemporary corporate language and people were uncertain whether the technology was secure enough to serve the marketplace. Today, however, Adobe is considered a global leader in digital marketing and a standard-bearer in the march toward digital transformation.

Recently, Narayen addressed transformation in comments for the Australian Financial Review while visiting Sydney for an Adobe symposium. In the sprawling land Down Under, the federal government raised transformation’s profile by creating a Digital Transformation Office that will oversee co-ordination and development of that country’s digitally delivered government services.

On this side of the Pacific, a development of such magnitude suggests Australia’s cloud is well above America’s, perhaps hovering somewhere near the stratosphere. In fact, the two markets remain at the same altitude, and attitude. For example, a recent survey found that 89 percent of large and medium-size retailers in Australia and 37 percent of small retailers believe they offer good customer service but had no means of measuring that perception beyond charting unsolicited customer feedback.

Narayen says that belief inflicts the boards of too many retailers worldwide and trickles down throughout their organizations to slow transformation’s progress.

“A great board is one that spends disproportionate amounts of time with management, taking active steps to understand the opportunities and challenges facing the business,” he told Financial Review. “With the world increasingly moving to digital and businesses implementing digital strategies, boards also need to boost their digital capabilities to be better strategic advisers to the business.”

In the United States, that will be tough when IT budgets are expected to rise no more than 1 percent higher this year over last, putting tech staffs in a difficult position to shepherd transformation at the legacy level.

At Adobe, “our digital transformation has been the foundation for growing our business, opening new doors to customer engagement and delivery, and also disrupting and leading many of the categories we operate in,” Narayen said. “Our board has been involved in our transformation strategy from day one and continues to be supportive.”

Probably every corporate board in the world is pondering digital transformation and desires Adobe-level results, Narayen said. The first step in that direction requires accepting digital’s dominance in the marketplace.

“Every multi-year strategic business plan must include digital thinking,” he said. “It’s not an option to ignore it.”

The next step requires boards to make a convincing argument for transformation and its overarching purpose.

“As an organization, we have to be clear why the digital transformation is going to be better for customers,” Narayen added.