Is "brand safety" a crutch for advertisers?

Maybe so, maybe not

Today’s going to be a short one. 

This morning, Ad Age has a story about how marketers are blocklisting Black Lives Matter keywords like “George Floyd,” “black people,” and “BLM” at Vice. 

Vice reviewed its catalog of news stories between June 2 and June 8 to see how much revenue each article generated on a CPM basis—the cost to show an ad 1,000 times—on the open programmatic marketplace. Although content related to George Floyd—protests, riots and Black Lives Matter—delivered the most traffic, CPMs were 57 percent lower than for ads associated with news stories on other topics, says Paul Wallace, VP of global revenue products and services at Vice Media.

So a couple things on this. 

One; I’d like to know if other publishers are finding this to be true. Vice has long had its struggles in courting advertisers, so I’d be interested in knowing if this is a Black Lives Matter thing or a Vice thing. 

Two; let’s give Vice the benefit of the doubt and say this is an industry scourge. Marketers, follow me to camera 3.

What are you doing? I don’t know where you got this notion of “brand safety” stuck in your brains, but let’s be honest with ourselves: you use “brand safety” as a protective cover. The fact is, brand safety is bullshit. 

You can’t shed crocodile tears when your ads suddenly appear next to questionable content when you hand your money to third parties who basically spend your money like Carly Rae Jespen throwing a baseball:

Brand safety is meaningless in a world where you have no issues sponsoring bad faith broadcasts and websites, or in a world where you constantly apologize for making, at best, tone-deaf ads. (Some of us remember Pepsi’s poor Black Lives Matter ad).

Finally, how do you square your complaints about “brand safety” while at the same time say that we have to support news organizations? 

According to AdExchanger:
82% of brands don’t actually want to avoid hard news, GroupM found in a study of its 50 largest clients. Using more nuanced tools that take context into account and allow brands to combine keywords can help them avoid over-blocking content.

There’s a really good solution here: give news sites your money because you know that journalism matters. 

Of course, we all know the answers to this. It’s because we are an industry led by a ‘mediocrity by necessity’ mentality. It’s easy, sorry, “efficient,” to buy inventory programmatically and then blame the ad tech vendor when your ad appears next to content you don’t like; it’s easy to blame the publisher for covering topics you don’t want to sponsor. 

The kicker to all this: it doesn’t even matter. One, Nobody sees your ads anyhow. We have 25 years of learning how to ignore display ads.

Two, and more important: nobody cares. Not a living soul connects the ads they see with the story they are reading. This is this heart of your brand safety concerns, that a person will connect your ad to the content. Nobody does this. Nobody visiting a news site to read about Black Live Matters is connecting your 300×250 display ad with the story. Know why? They aren’t there for your ad (again, if they even see your ad.) The only people who care: marketers. So stop using brand safety as a crutch.  

/rant

In other brand safety news, the fabulous newsletter Branded walks readers through the smoke and mirrors of one of ad tech’s big boys, Criteo, finding that even though the ad network says it plays it safe for their advertisers, the reality is very different (and notice the use of ‘bad faith’ – this is where advertisers should be concerned; not ‘brand safety’ but putting your ad spend against bad faith publishers. 

Criteo doesn’t have a handle on their inventory

We started by combing through for bad faith publishers. On the list, we found about two dozen websites promoting racism, COVID-19 disinformation, and extreme hate speech. (Including The Gateway Pundit, which Criteo dropped just last week after a Bloomberg reporter’s inquiry.)

And to tie all this together, AdExchanger reports that the ad tech machine is brrring up its engine, as “Programmatic ad spend overall rose 14% in May, per PubMatic, and brands hardest hit by the pandemic are working their way back.”

Data from ad tech companies including SpotX and PubMatic – as well as analytics firms such as Pixalate and MediaRadar – indicate the possibility of a gradual recovery beginning in May.

Thank you for allowing me into your inbox. I’m sure you have thoughts on this, let me hear them!

Men Without Hats, “The Safety Dance”

Some interesting links:

• Pompeo Aide Who Pushed Saudi Arms Sale Said to Have Pressured Inspector General (NYT)

• HISTORY! Congress Poised to Get Its First QAnon Believer (Daily Beast)

• Read Some Condescending Emails From Former BA EIC Adam Rapoport About What Is and Isn’t Brownface (Jezebel)

• America’s Long Overdue Awakening to Systemic Racism (TIME)

• Hollywood Is About to Reopen. It Could Be Better Than Before (WIRED)

• ‘The pressure is on’: Black employees demand change at agencies where ‘white culture’ has been dominant (Digiday)