If it’s brand safety you really want, drop the tech and trust the editors

But on their digital platforms, an entirely different process is taking place. In the background, adtech is actively preventing brands from appearing in the main news sections on the website, despite being the most read.

How have we got to a place where advertising in news is considered an unsafe environment? Why now, after more than a century of advertising in newsbrands, have we suddenly decided that advertising next to bad news somehow equates to endorsing it?

I first remember hearing the term ‘brand safety’ in 2017 when the YouTube scandal broke. An investigation by The Times revealed that ads had been running alongside extremist content on the platform, plunging media agencies and brands alike into a state of molten panic. I was working at The Guardian at the time, and we were also not immune – our ads had appeared on ISIS video content, in front of men wearing balaclavas and holding AK47s, with a banner ad saying ‘Become a Guardian member’.

Awkward.

After all fallout and flurry of apologies, serious questions had to be asked.

It was hardly a secret that most people buying digital advertising couldn’t account for every single ad placement they had made – how could they, when they were buying tens of millions of impressions?

But until that point, no-one had wanted to admit publicly that meant brands appearing in the absolute sewers of the internet.

That led to an increase in usage of brand safety technology, which uses a system of keywords to stop brands appearing next to wildly unsuitable content or ending up inadvertently funding damaging behaviour. As has been widely reported, over time this has led to an over-correction, where content on reputable websites has been unfairly penalized.

Again, when I was at The Guardian, we faced a day in 2020 when 96% of impressions on the home page were classed as brand unsafe due to content about drugs. It was in fact, a big day for the coronavirus vaccine. This situation was by no means a one-off - articles about racism were regularly blocked for "being racist,” and a piece about chess was deemed unsafe for featuring the word “attack.” [Editor’s note: Football coverage and 'shoot' is another example].

This stuff happens every single day at every single publisher. It’s farcical.

I have no doubt that the brand safety businesses are sincere and working hard to make the technology smarter, but I question whether it is necessary to apply it to news brands at all.

At Bountiful Cow we believe that quality newsbrands are brand safe. Full stop. We trust newspaper editors to decide what’s appropriate for their readers.

This is a problem caused by the metrics that pass for success in digital advertising. If a click-through rate is your idea of a successful outcome, and your click-through rate is 0.09%, then you have to buy millions and millions of impressions to make it work. The only way to satisfy that need is to spread the ad far and wide, where brand safety technology becomes essential to protect you from the worst of the internet.

If we redefined our idea about what success means – for example, noticing, admiring and remembering an advertisement (imagine!) – then maybe we wouldn’t need to buy so many impressions. Maybe then the buyer could be in a position where they knew every site where their ads had run. And maybe then the millions of people reading newsbrands in a high-quality environment would be a prized asset to any media plan.

Our programmatic product, ‘Relative Advantage: Unblocked,’ with Ozone, buys impressions deemed ‘brand unsafe’ from quality publishers. Our agency proposition of Relative Advantage is about finding the spaces that competitors have overlooked or neglected, and content about news, sport and sex that millions of people read every day fits that bill completely.

The truth is our product shouldn’t need to exist.

We’re calling on everyone in the industry to review this situation immediately and either scale back their use of brand safety technology on quality publishers or just turn it off completely.

That’s a leap we need to make soon because depriving newsbrands of the investment they deserve and have consistently proven to be effective will have a catastrophic impact on our society. Journalism costs money. Investigations cost money. The less money going to quality newsbrands, the more money will go to more questionable areas of the internet. Imagine a world without quality journalism, we might never have known about the Windrush scandal or MPs’ expenses for example.

Make no mistake, this is on us as an industry.

If we need a cautionary tale, we can find it in the lamentable decline of local press. A drop in advertising revenue over the last couple of decades has led to crippling cuts and ultimately the decimation of local news titles. You don’t need to agree with every word that’s written in every paper to recognise the importance of that. It means less scrutiny of the powerful and less championing of less powerful voices. We cannot afford to ignore that lesson when it comes to our national press.

Regardless of the broader societal implications, more pertinently to our industry, a valuable and effective advertising medium will begin to shrink and lose its power. We use it or we lose it.

Can we really afford to starve a media channel with such reach, quality and influence? The answer is clearly no. And it’s time to take positive action.

Continue the conversation with Adam here. More from The Drum Opinion section here.