By Stephanie Himoff, Executive Vice President of Global Publishers, Outbrain
The social media ground has shifted beneath our feet. What was already a challenging environment at times – led, to a large degree, by Twitter’s morphing into X and blue ticks making way for ‘uncensored’ – entered a whole new phase when Meta announced it was ditching independent fact-checkers.
As Facebook and Instagram join the X camp and enter their own Wild West phase of community notes, accuracy is now in the hands of the platforms’ users instead of independent fact-checking moderators.
These latest moves by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg once again highlight the issue of brand safety on social channels and this has significant repercussions for the advertising industry. Where to advertise in a brand safe way? Step up, premium news sites. Because there are myriad options for brands wanting their advertising to reach a broad digital audience but without the risk of appearing next to conspiracy theories, misinformation and falsehoods.
If advertisers’ nerves have jangled previously at the thought of their products and services being promoted next to hard news, research shows that their concerns are misplaced. Appearing alongside current affairs is not the same as popping up adjacent to extremist posts.
In fact, Stagwell’s Future of Media report with research from HarrisX offers proof that ads next to political stories – too often feared by advertisers as being too polarizing – are not problematic for the brands. Rather, premium digital news environments offer levels of brand safety and attention metrics that few other sites can match. Making them exactly what advertisers want.
Quality new sites – with all their associated reputation and trust – draw in readers and enjoy increased attention around big news cycles. Ads next to political stories perform as effectively as those that appear alongside business, sports or entertainment stories according to Stagwell’s research. So, this debunks the notion that political stories might be deemed non-brand safe.
In fact, new research as part of The Future of Media and ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos has found that 69% of chief executives and board directors think brand safety protocols on news stories are overapplied. More than half (57%) said it was a mistake to apply brand safety across all news outlets and types of news content and three quarters thought their companies should advertise in news more. So, it is time to reassess banned words and blocklists. This is especially necessary around events and moments in time – if ‘blood’ is on your blocklist, that’s a lot of Halloween content you’ll be missing out on advertising alongside.
As social media becomes an ever-riskier environment for brands to advertise in, CMOs making decisions about media choice for their advertising need to be sentient to this and to where the safest environments for their brands are. The changes that are currently taking place mean reputable news sites are going to become even more precious; digital spaces where stories are verified, facts are checked, and information is substantiated will be the safe brand havens.
While ‘fake news’ is a favorite retort of some people when quality news sites post stories they don’t agree with, that descriptor doesn’t hold. The global Trust in News report from Kantar pointed to efforts to label ‘mainstream news media’ as ‘fake news’ as having largely failed. The reputation of traditional print and broadcast media outlets has proved more resilient than social media platforms and online only news outlets, primarily because of the depth of coverage these outlets deliver. People retain a strong belief that quality journalism remains key to a healthy democracy – although some are skeptical about what they read and how effective journalists are in holding power to account.
For advertisers the company you keep matters – affecting the bottom line as well as their reputations. Advertisers enjoy the reflected glory of quality and trustworthiness from the content of the sites they pay to be on. Research from the UK, found that the benefit goes beyond trust and reputation, to positively impacting advertisers’ profits. It found that advertisers that used news brands experienced an 88% uplift in profits in 2018-2022 compared with non-users of news brands.
Advertisers investing their advertising in quality publishing sites are not only ensuring they appear in brand-safe environments, but they are also investing in the high-quality environments more broadly as they help fund those sites and the cost of quality journalism. Which is a win win.
Publisher sites are also looking at new ways of delivering their content to stay ahead of the game; by adopting social-style experiences they are offering new formats to appeal to audiences. For instance, we’re seeing the rise of vertical video formats – extending from walled gardens to the open web publishers – as a way of attracting younger audiences to news sites. With this vertical video integration, publishers can increase the time audiences spend with them as well as reusing assets they may have already created for social outlets.
How brands respond to the latest changes taking place on Meta’s platforms remains to be seen. But advertisers do have options, and this is a moment for them to rethink their approach to blocklists and banned words and take a fresh approach to their online advertising budgets and the role of news sites in their advertising mix.