News publishers and broadcasters warn over advertising blacklists

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Media groups have warned that advertisers have been blacklisting news over ill-founded fears that their brands are damaged by being displayed close to certain stories, leading to concerns about the effect on future funding for important journalism.

A study carried out by US-based marketing group Stagwell said that “news has been systematically demonetized and faces significant bias” compared with more “favourable advertising environments” such as sports and entertainment.

News websites have been hit by the widespread use of software that sets out hundreds of key subjects and words to avoid in the automated process of placing advertisements against stories. In other cases, marketers simply want to avoid straight news stories in the belief that people are less likely to feel favourable to their brands than if they were advertising alongside entertainment stories.

Less than half of Olympic Games content was classified as “brand safe” for advertisers, for example, according to a report by Reach looking at those publishers not using its ad platform Mantis. This was because some keyword blacklists used by the ad industry have kept the word “Paris” since terror attacks in the city nine years ago.

However, the Stagwell study, which surveyed 22,000 UK adults and 50,000 US adults, showed that readers do not react negatively to brands whose ads appear alongside news content. It tested different brand ads placed adjacent to eight types of news, and found that it was safe for brands to advertise adjacent to quality content, regardless of topic. 

Mark Penn, chief executive of Stagwell and former chief strategy officer of Microsoft, said that “brand safety has been causing advertisers to shy away from news, but has been massively overblown”.

He added: “There are a fair number of marketers who have intentionally zeroed out of news to focus on sports and entertainment. Journalism is underfunded because news is under monetised.”

Jamie Credland, chief executive of World Media Group, an alliance of media organisations including the New York Times and Reuters, said there was a “real problem” in brands being prevented or choosing not to advertise next to news media.

Some marketing directors were actively avoiding putting their brands on news sites, Credland said, while others found that the automated systems around brand safety were “complicated, outdated and poorly maintained”.

Rob Bradley, senior vice-president of digital revenue, strategy and operations at CNN International Commercial, said that commonly used “off the shelf” software that guided the automated placement of ads against media was too blunt. 

He pointed to examples of reports of football games being blacklisted owing to the use of the word “attack” in the keywords filtered out by these tools, or where positive stories over scientific breakthroughs were excluded given the prominence of disease names.  

Credland said that there was a resulting and growing disincentive to invest in “hard news” such as investigations and war coverage but also less contentious subjects in dedicated local journalism such as health and housing policies. 

Some publishers have had to launch their own tools for advertisers to use to avoid discriminating against certain types of media. CNN, for example, offers its Sentiment Analysis Moderator — a brand safety and suitability tool that analyses the context of sentences using neuro-linguistic artificial intelligence to determine when content is brand suitable.