The advertising industry holds the power to sustain democracy through reinvesting in quality journalism. Ali Manning, COO and co-founder of Chalice Custom Algorithms, explores practical steps marketers, agencies, and media owners can take to support a free press while driving value for brands.
Obviously, a lot of us are concerned about the current and future state of democracy. But we—the AdMonsters readership, a brain trust of the advertising industry—don’t work in politics or government, so what are we to do? A lot, actually.
The future of democracy is deeply intertwined with the industry of advertising. It may be one of the most powerful forces shaping democracy because it funds the foundation of democracy—a free and fair press.
And we’ve been systematically gutting it.
The Cost of Brand Safety Overcorrections
Most of us know why and how that happened (quick recap: “gotcha” brand safety moments leading to hyperbolic paranoia, followed by solutions that thoughtlessly overcorrected).
At this point, it might seem like an intractable, helpless situation, at least for those of us who don’t control ad budgets and media plans, or the platform algorithms that determine what content is promoted to their user base.
The First Step: Awareness of News Exclusion
Even the most junior ad operations professional has influence. One of the most impactful actions we can take is to call attention to two critical sets of facts that can meaningfully move things in the right direction.
The first is ensuring brands and agencies are aware of their investment, or lack thereof, in the news. I recall Vanessa Otero of Ad Fontes Media telling me about the circuitous situation she found herself in when she spoke to a CMO who said she fully supports advertising in news environments, only for Vanessa to turn to the agency and be told that it’s the CMO’s directive not to run ads on news content.
I believe this is systemic across the industry—blocking the news has become a default of sorts, to the point where many people don’t even give it a second thought every time they implement a new ad campaign.
So, in a respectful and “just making sure we are all on the same page” manner, we can all call attention to whether news is excluded wholly or only partially limited from a media plan or as a campaign setting. It may turn out no one intends to do it.
Of course, plenty do, in which case we move to the second set of facts that can be surfaced that support the case that the news brings brands much more value than risk. Thankfully, the fact base to back this up is growing.
The Second Step: Proving News’ Value to Brands
Marketers seek highly engaged, quality audiences with a positive impact of content adjacency for their brand. Stagwell’s recently published “Future of News” study addresses both. Its findings are that news is a category with higher audience loyalty and engagement than sports or entertainment, with consumers of news checking in an average of 5.6 times a day.
More remarkably, the study also found that the impact on brand favorability and purchase intent was about the same or in some cases better when advertisements appeared next to news content about the Middle East, Crime, Trump, Biden, or Inflation as for when the same advertisements appeared next to Business, Entertainment or Sports content.
The full study is rigorous and has extensive supporting data without being onerous. It’s worth a read and even more, a recommendation.
Price matters a lot, and if you have access to any data on news CPMs versus other categories, you can use that to show how cheap impressions on news content are relative to other categories. With so many advertisers blocking it, the CPMs are a fraction of their value. Showing real numbers should get any budget decision-makers head turning.
From Testing to Action: A Path Forward
Finally, it won’t just be facts to move things. There needs to be a plan. One that provides options that give everyone a sense of security, which is often just about incremental change.
Luckily, nearly everyone in marketing is familiar with the concept of a “test budget.” The trick will be making sure the test is measured by something meaningful, like brand health, versus something gameable, like clicks, completes or last-touch conversions.
Algorithmic gaming is a deeply rooted problem of our ecosystem, rewarding ads-crowded, low-quality content to proliferate and suck up budgets. Unfortunately, many smaller news pubs have resorted to MFA-like page structures to survive. Rewarding measurable outcomes that have real business outcomes will reward quality and premium ad placement. We just need to get the virtuous cycle started.
Testing is not all or nothing. Brands can test trusted publishers or use a partner like Ad Fontes who curates PMPs that can be customized based on a brand’s tolerance for partisan bias and journalistic reliability. It will make a meaningful difference to democracy to invest in the narrowest band of the highest fact-checked, unbiased reporting.
Of course, each news publication needs to stand on its own to prove its worth. But let’s prove the category first!
Any of us can help re-fund the cornerstone of democracy by taking action to call attention to the facts and suggest at least one step in the direction of evaluating the true suitability of advertising in the news.