Publishers continue to face a battle to sell advertising against online news because of brand safety myths, Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference heard.
Research from Stagwell last year found that the perception among a generation of marketers that news is “unsafe” has needlessly cost the news industry billions in revenue.
Imogen Fox, global chief advertising officer at The Guardian, said it was “very, very frustrating” that there is “an awful lot of talk and not much action” – although she emphasised not all advertisers are included in this.
She feels that the brand safety debate is “illogical… because we know that 96% of people read the news online in some form so why on earth would you not want to put your brand near them? And then countless studies show that there is no correlation between a bad news story and whether that reflects on the brand.”
Fox added: “The ones that do [advertise] are the ones that are going to be rewarded, because it’s really important that we fund quality news and if you are – and I hate this word – if you are brave, and you advertise next to the news, you do see good results.
“We’ve done it a few times. We had BT advertise next to our election content in the UK. That was seen as a bold move on their part.
“It wasn’t because obviously, lots of people were reading and highly engaged, and it had brilliant results for their brands. So I just wish more people would do that.”
[Brand safety: Why social is far more risky than news for marketers]
Fox also noted that the breadth of content at The Guardian means there are “less extremely sensitive news stories than you would think. There’s a lot of lifestyle content, there’s a lot of comment, there’s a lot of other content that isn’t hard, breaking news.”
News inventory provides ‘solid quality attention’
Similarly Gareth Cross, senior director digital solutions at The Telegraph, noted that although the tools available to advertisers have been enhanced, the “application of those tools is still pretty much how they were before, and it’s really frustrating.
“The reality is we’ve got countless studies, both carried out from a publisher perspective and equally by agencies outside of that, to prove the reality of what the news inventory provides, and that’s real, solid quality attention, great engagement, and we routinely see it from the Telegraph perspective that some of the best performance comes from that inventory.”
There is no industry definition for attention as an ad metric but newsbrand marketing body Newsworks uses “the amount of time people spend looking at an ad, specifically measured in ‘attention seconds per 1,000 impressions’”.
Newsworks research published on 25 September showed digital display ads on newsbrand websites get 40% more attentive seconds from consumers per advertising pound spent compared to non-news sites, according to Lumen data. Video ads on newsbrands generated 24% more attention than on other sites.
Newsworks noted that ten years ago, more than 70% of adspend in the UK was in high-attention channels including newsbrands, magazines, TV, radio and cinema, as opposed to low-attention (out-of-home, social and internet pure play sites excluding search and direct mail).
That figure has now flipped, even though Newsworks said high-attention media campaigns deliver 58% more attentive seconds for every pound spent, with a 17% uplift in brand effects and 12% increase in market share.
Cross noted that The Telegraph has various ways it can ensure safety for brands.
Sensitive tags (which can be deployed only be a small group of people) can be added to stories to remove all adverts, while a 24/7 “bad ads team” respond quicker than an ambulance callout, Cross claimed, to anything that needs to be acted on.
Advertisers asked if they were ‘safe’ from Charlie Kirk content
Arshiya Nazir, programmatic strategy director at ad agency Dentsu, revealed that keeping news publishers in a brand’s spending plan was “probably the biggest fight that we had to have”, especially since the Covid-19 pandemic.
“It’s undeniable that news publishers represent quality scale and quality inventory as well as quality audiences, but it is a huge fight on our hands when we have to protect our clients from certain content that they don’t want to be around.”
The discussion was taking place the day after US political activist Charlie Kirk was shot dead at a speech and Nazir said advertisers had been asking if they were “safe” from that content and needed reassuring.
Dentsu is instead urging brands to do “context avoidance”, choosing environments that align with their values and brand image. Nazir said they do not even talk about “brand safety” anymore, instead describing “brand environment planning”.
For example some clients have particular areas they need to avoid, whereas others such as charities are “more than happy to be around negative news, war stories, everything like that. It helps what they want to achieve, the donations that they want to receive. It works in their favour. It doesn’t work in the favour as much for other clients.”
Nazir said this approach has been a “huge help into getting them to stop blocking on a keyword level, and we’ve definitely come leaps and bounds from there to reassure them and ensure that there is room for news publishers to be on plan and get back the budgets that they had probably lost since pre-Covid.
“But it is an ebbing and flowing conversation, because each client has their different risk level.”
‘News is 100% brand safe’
David Goddard, SVP, business development for measurement and publisher solutions at DoubleVerify, told the panel advertisers are “not fully utilising or realising the potential of news.
“Many are using blunt tools or taking blunt approaches to run their media campaigns and sometimes avoiding huge swathes of really important news publishers.”
Goddard said this is despite research showing “someone on a news site is 16% more engaged than a non-news site.
“The content is extremely sophisticated, and with the news publishers, carries that level of quality or authenticity that is passed on to the brand. So the brand perception is increased.
“And also, because there is this underinvestment in news, it’s a huge opportunity for advertisers to take the opportunity to make the most of this unutilised inventory and to see their campaigns perform better.”
DoubleVerify is running a news accelerator programme with major advertisers and publishers to discuss solutions and help release new educational material and better monetisation tools.
Goddard emphasised that “news is 100% brand safe. There are no brand safety issues with news.
“There are sensitivities to particular content, and publishers [are] utilising tools to ensure that advertisers are avoiding the sensitive parts of news… there will be particular news subject matter that some brands will insist on avoiding, but the rest of the news is fantastic and highly performant for advertisers.
“We need to do a better job at educating our advertisers to invest more in news and utilise the tools that are either available through their own toolset or even a publisher’s toolset to ensure that they can advertise on news with comfort in a brand suitable environment. But that comes from more education, more conversations like this and more output from all of us.”
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