Curated News from The Drum on January 14, 2020
‘Sex’, ‘violence‘, ‘death‘, ‘alcohol‘, ‘slavery‘, ‘kill‘, ‘injury‘, ‘shoot‘, ‘disaster‘ and ‘bastards‘ – these are some of the keywords brands are choosing not to advertise against in 2020, enlisting automated tech to stop their ads from appearing around content containing these words.
With global digital ad budgets taking an increasingly big slice of the pie, brand safety is still high on chief marketers’ agendas. However, blacklists aren’t just protecting brands against misplacement: they’re also blocking active participles that feature in trusted publishers’ most important and most-read news stories, creating a deficit of support for hard-hitting journalism.
Top media owners are being penalised with blunt brand-safety tools to the tune of $3.2bn a year across the US, UK, Japan and Australia according to fresh research from real-time brand safety business Cheq. Its study found that the blacklists employed by publishers and buyers can include as many as 3,000 word and are blocking ads from articles, regardless of the context of the word.