Dive Brief:
- Marketers and media buyers are becoming increasingly prickly about brand safety, adding mainstream sites like foxnews.com to their publisher blacklists in the wake of tense political flashpoints, according to a report Digiday.
- One month ago, an unnamed automaker stopped serving ads in the news category that didn't align with its values, a campaign manager at a major ad holding group told Digiday under conditions of anonymity. The same campaign manager said keywords such as "Nazis" and "Charlottesville" started to be blocked in programmatic campaigns for the auto brand following the white supremacist and neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, VA, two weeks ago — an episode that led to the death of one counterprotester. Such granular filtering could extend to other mainstream media outlets like The New York Times or CNN, Digiday said.
- The blocked news category covers hundreds of publishers including foxnews.com, the only mainstream media outlet currently on the cited agency's blacklist. However, Fox News' site was given that distinction before the Charlottesville incident and dates back to March, as the agency felt it was controversial enough to be dangerous to brand safety in the same way far-right sites like Breitbart and Infowars are.
Dive Insight:
The political climate might be becoming so charged that brands feel compelled to halt their ads from appearing next to any news outlets at all, regardless of credibility. Brand safety has been a growing concern for marketers in recent years, especially in the online space, but it's usually been relegated to massive platforms like YouTube, where content is largely user-generated and often too broad to comprehensively monitor, along with inflammatory or fringe publishers.
The Digiday report, however, points to the mainstream media getting embroiled in the issue in a way that hasn't really been the case in the past. For publisher sites that are struggling to generate revenue in the wake of growing ad blocker adoption, being blacklisted from campaigns simply due to covering the news could be alarming.
The trend also points to how marketers are taking back control over where their ads appear online following myriad problems in the programmatic space.