Advertisers Expand Their Avoidance to News Sites, Blacklisting Specific Words

'The Washington Post's crossword puzzle was recently deemed too offensive for advertisers,' reports the Wall Street Journal. 'So was an article about thunderstorms. And a ranking of boxed brownie mixes.

'Marketers have long been wary about running ads in the news media, concerned that their brands will land next to pieces about terrorism or plane crashes or polarizing political stories.' But 'That advertising no-go zone seems to keep widening.'
It is a headache that news publishers can hardly afford. Many are also grappling with subscriber declines and losses in traffic from Google and other tech platforms, and are now making an aggressive push to change advertisers' perceptions... News organizations recently began publicizing studies that show it really isn't dangerous for a brand to appear near a sensitive story. At the same time, they say blunt campaign-planning tools wind up fencing off even harmless content — and those stories' potentially large audiences — from advertisements. Forty percent of the Washington Post's material is deemed 'unsafe' at any given time, said Johanna Mayer-Jones, the paper's chief advertising officer, referencing a study the company did about a year ago. 'The revenue implications of that are significant.'

The Washington Post's crossword page was blocked by advertisers' technology seven times during a weekslong period in October because it was labeled as politics, news and natural disaster-related material. (A tech company recently said it would ensure the puzzle stops getting blocked, according to the Post.) The thunderstorm story was cut off from ad revenue when a sentence about 'flashing and pealing volleys from the artillery of the atmosphere' triggered a warning that it was too much like an 'arms and ammunition' story. As for the brownies, a reference to research from 'grocery, drug, mass-market' and other retailers was automatically flagged by advertisers for containing the word 'drug.'

While some brands avoid news entirely, many take what they consider to be a more surgical approach. They create lengthy blacklists of words or websites that the company considers off-limits and employ ad technology to avoid such terms. Over time, blacklists have become extremely detailed, serving as a de facto news-blocking tool, publishers said... The lists are used in automated ad buying. Brands aim their ads not at specific websites, but at online audiences with certain characteristics — people with particular shopping or web-browsing histories, for example. Their ads are matched in real-time to available inventory for thousands of websites... These days, less than 5% of client ad spending for GroupM, one of the largest ad-buying firms in the world, goes to news, according to Christian Juhl, GroupM's former chief executive who revealed spending figures during a congressional hearing over the summer.
A recent blacklist from Microsoft included about 2,000 words including 'collapse,' according to the article. ('Microsoft declined to comment.')

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