"Advertisers will simply never know what their campaign could have achieved" - in this op-ed, Tom Pickworth, Director of Technical Operations, Commercial, Mail Metro Media joins us to look at the brand safety discussion, and why advertisers are still shying away from news...

The discussion about brand safety in advertising has rarely been out of the headlines. From reports about ads served on unsafe domains or next to problematic content types, through to declining investment in publisher-produced content per a recent WARC finding, the issue of news advertising has become badly entangled with ‘true’ brand safety concerns around pornography, CSAM, or illegal downloads. It is limiting the true potential of campaigns, while also constraining the vital societal role that regulated, IPSO-certified news publishing provides. There are voices in the industry seeking to change this, including Bountiful Cow with their Back Don’t Block campaign and Newsworks, but many are still too scared to invest in news content. 

The state of play

Current approaches to brand safety see publishers often using complicated custom segments that have been refined over time to resolve safety issues. We're forced to ring-fence almost two-fifths of our inventory from clients who won’t shift from rigorously applied standards for news; averaging around 1,400 news articles per month. Perceived reputational damage is so feared that often the highest standards of brand safety requirements are applied to campaigns, sometimes well above what is necessary, simply to ensure zero risk for the brand while also delivering the campaign on time. 

Keywords often represent a more certain way of blocking harmful content from an advertiser perspective, but it is a very broad brush stroke approach. They take any subjectivity out of the equation, while being very easy to get wrong. Unfortunately, there is no perceived downside for advertisers and their agencies when applying keyword blocking. They will simply never know what their campaign could have achieved, as they never see the returns from content they do not appear alongside. Any kind of brand safety blocking reduces scope for campaign optimisation, increases costs, and removes support for regulated and valuable news content. Perhaps most importantly, news is the fundamental reason why the vast majority of readers come directly to our pages every day. Our role is to keep users informed.   

Agility and the overlooked upside of news

Publishers already have to be highly agile and responsive to news developments when it comes to advertiser content. We frequently have takeovers booked on our home page and monitor unfolding issues to issue alerts if a major incident relevant to the brand happens, such as an airline and a plane crash. In this case, we offer to move the takeover to another section or day. 

Not all clients take this option. Some see the benefit of increased news-driven traffic to be of higher value than any concerns over association with ‘hard’ news. They often receive a huge uplift in traffic and engagement as a result. Often these news stories have a significant impact on the world, with the biggest audiences and the greatest engagement levels. Currently, these positives are overlooked due to fear of consumer backlash, when it is very possible to engage with news content in a more limited way without facing brand incidents, through products like homepage or news takeovers, and news CPM campaigns.  

Accessing highly engaged audiences

We are the UK’s most engaged publisher, and news is our most engaged area, by far. News attracts higher volumes of audiences, and those consumers also have significantly longer dwell times on articles. Analysing across 30 days' engagement, news achieves an average of one minute 39 seconds per article. It’s only natural that many publishers would love to connect clients to highly interested users reading these pieces, and demonstrate the sheer power of this increased engagement and uplift.

Speaking of the users, multiple research studies have found that they do not connect hard news with the advertisers appearing alongside articles. Stagwell’s latest research study discovered that advertising next to news on politically sensitive or potentially inflammatory topics (such as the Middle East, crime, Nigel Farage, Sir Keir Starmer, or inflation) scored a 66% when assessed across brand favourability, purchase consideration, and wider brand perception metrics. Ads on ‘brand safe’ sports and entertainment content delivered only one percentage point higher. This underlines that, when approached correctly, news sponsorships or data-enabled premium display options could run with a category exclusion set to the highest threshold with little to no risk of brand damage from the perspective of the user. 

When advertising alongside major stories is seriously curtailed, news journalism becomes subsidised by other sections such as showbiz and sport. This needs to change. Advertising next to hard news does not imply support of terrorist organisations or criminal behaviour. However, it is supporting the journalists who write about vitally important issues. Instead of seeing the whole news landscape as potentially high-risk, the perspective of brand suitability specifies clear ‘no go’ areas, while capitalising on the broader potential and engagement from this highly engaging content. 

Advertisers who choose to be braver, bolder, and support quality, regulated news journalism will not only stand out from the pack. In an attention economy, breaking news both commands and keeps user engagement. Restricting campaign scope to only certain content topics is advertising with the brakes on.