Media Briefing: European publishers speak out on advertisers’ punishing brand safety practices

In light of this week’s U.S. presidential election, publishers are looking at the likely scenario of advertisers upping their brand safety blockades. Although that’s not to say that the present brand-safety situation facing publishers isn’t already challenging.

During last week’s Digiday Publishing Summit Europe in Barcelona, Spain, publishers spoke out on the brand safety situation during behind-closed-doors town hall sessions, in which participants were granted anonymity in exchange for candor. The conversation touched on not only the impacts of overblocking but who’s to blame for it — brands, agencies, ad verification firms, all of the above? — as well as how the financial incentives may be set against publishers’ favor and why communication may be both an underlying cause and the ultimate solution.

Here’s a selection of what they had to say.

The overblocking issue

“Four years ago, we had [an increase of] 4X, 5X in traffic for certain pages, and revenue naturally went up. I’m not sure that will happen the same this year because so much of that content is going to be blocked.”

“Something like 30% of our content gets blocked around Halloween, and we’re talking stuff like ‘monster cakes.’”

“It’s not a new problem, but it is frustrating for publishers because we’re squeezed everywhere. We were joking about the Apple side of the ecosystem; that has a revenue impact. And then on top of that, you’re losing money for overblocking. It’s a significant issue.”

“There was some work that we did as a publishing group to look at the spend that we were getting via programmatic channels. Based on our scale, it was something like 2% to 4% of what we should have been getting because of the categorization, like we create political content.”

“The irony of the situation is that we [as publishers] are held to very stringent laws and regulations around the content that’s created — things that don’t exist on social media — but yet there is such a disproportionate amount of spend that’s going [to the social platforms].”

The human problem at brands and agencies

“As a publisher, we know what all the issues are, but we can’t solve it without the help of not only brands and advertisers understanding but also agencies changing the way that they’re buying and their own reliance on these platforms.”

“One of the reasons why agencies tick that box off from a brand safety perspective is because they’re going to get a backlash from the client. They’re going to send them a screenshot and be really cross with the fact that their advertisement has been placed next to an article about genocide or whatever it might be.”

“You have a lot of tension that exists between global and local advertisers as well. Oftentimes someone like Mondelez will say, ‘Well, actually, at the local level we’re just being told by our global team to do this.’”

“I’m not sure that it’s agency-driven necessarily. I don’t think there’s a deliberate intent to cause that issue. I do think potentially there’s a laziness not to solve it.”

“There are a lot of things agencies could have done to solve some of these issues themselves, and they’re very quick to come out and talk to press and say, ‘We’re right behind the news industry,’ but not necessarily going to spend on news.”

“Clients also need to push back to agencies and ask telling questions about why their money is being spent in a certain way rather than just accept what agencies are telling them. Because they seem to think that the value is in brands that have credibility, but they don’t really put the budgets in that sense. If you look at the split to spend, it’s not equal. It’s not equitable.”

“From a client’s perspective, they’re spending money and then trusting the agency to spend in the best way possible. From an agency perspective, they’re got to deal with a lot of publishers, a lot of clients at the same time. It’s an easy way for them to push the blame away from themselves. And at the end, the publisher gets hurt because there’s really great content that doesn’t get monetized in a way it should.”

“As long as the block rate isn’t too high on a given campaign, you’re not going to get fired for overblocking. You will get fired if you run across pornography or terrorism or whatever it is.”

“It’s actually just kind of human laziness with these [block]lists.”

“The publisher is always going to point to an agency. An agency is always going to point to the publisher. And the client is going to point to the agency. And it’s a neverending circle.”

“You have that fine conversation [explaining the impact of overblocking to a brand], and you feel like you’ve moved the needle. And then the brief comes in or the campaign comes in, and suddenly they’re asking for a DV tag.”

“You’ve got clients going out to three, four different agencies asking for RFPs and pricing structures and everything else. They’re really being crunched down on their CPM rates, and they’re using programmatic to justify the low rates. So you’ve got to think from that perspective, how do you solve that challenge and allow them to still do that user-based targeting in a brand safe way. And it still has to be a more contextual signal than just keyword-based blacklisting. Come on, the tech solution can’t be that difficult. There’s so much money circulating in the advertising world, and it seems like an easy fix.”

The technology problem at ad verification firms

“It really feels like a technology problem rather than an agency problem. The agencies are using the technology in a way that’s often instructed to them by their clients as well. So often DoubleVerify or Integral [Ad Science] will go direct to their client, and that technology is mandated down to the agency. So [the agencies are] acting rationally from that perspective.”

“The technology companies probably need to be better at managing brand suitability, which a lot of what this conversation actually is: content that’s suitable that’s being overblocked, basically.”

“The thing is — with the likes of IAS, DoubleVerify as well — it seems like they’ve got a bit of mission creep. We started off with ‘Oh, it’s about brand safety and keywords.’ And then they’ve got tools where they can set their own viewability, and if you [as a publisher] don’t have a way to measure that viewability at your end, then it becomes a conversation that you’re not performing. And then they’ve got a tool where they decide on what the ad density on a page can be, and if they decide by these custom settings if you’re a made-for-advertising page, then agencies can block you.”

“They seem to be adding extra stuff that they’re doing, which as a publisher, unless you’re having to pay and put all this stuff in, which obviously is then cutting into your bottom line.”

“I’m not saying agencies don’t occasionally apply the technology badly. But I think it’s maybe a technology challenge: Are those platforms as good as they should be? Maybe not. Rather than agencies being outwardly malicious most of the time, I guess there’s some incompetence there as well.”

“This is a technology challenge. With all the tools and stuff that’s available to us, someone like IAB should step in and move away from keyword blacklisting to perhaps looking at more contextual signals on the page to differentiate between a football game and some inappropriate content.”

The problematic commercial incentives (and lack thereof)

“I don’t think those [ad verification] companies are invested in helping publishers to scale their inventory. They’re incentivized to block as much content as possible, because that is obviously what drives their business.”

“If you think about where a lot of the money lies for those contracts [with verification firms] now, it is client-direct. We look at [DoubleVerify’s] business, a lot of those contracts are direct. Same with [Integral Ad Science]. For them, the incentive has to come from their customers saying, ‘We’re really concerned about this.’”

“A lot of the change has to come from the technology companies. But then there has to be a financial incentive for them to improve their tools’ capabilities when it comes to managing suitability, not just safety. They need to get better at brand suitability, and for that to happen, there needs to be a commercial incentive.”

“You go to a WPP event; DoubleVerify and IAS are all over it. There is a deep financial relationship happening, and I do think that’s part of the reason that there isn’t more of a push to figure this out at that level.”

The communication breakdown

“It is more of a conversation about getting together, marketing ourselves as group, joining studies, doing research, using platforms like Digiday to get conversations out. I think it’s more a human problem.”

“A crucial piece we’re missing is the chain of command. The reason why you’ve got brand safety measures in place is either a CMO or someone from the executive team spotted something to send something to a lower level who’s forwarded that on to the agency, to the director, to the manager level and said, ‘Why have you bought this?’ That chain of command is very hard to penetrate. The solution has to be making the C-level feel comfortable with having that slight risk.”

“These businesses were built on the back of publishers, and we are the ones that are being impacted. And there’s not enough industry collaboration to try and help solve this. Just us here in this room talking about it won’t fix it. We need agency partners and advertisers to work alongside us.”

“We need to just do a bit of joined-up thinking. Work out what’s good for us as a publisher [and] what’s good for an agency. Unless you can align those two things, it’s never going to work. You’re going to be butting heads.”

“I’ve had different points of thinking during this [discussion]. First, I thought it needs to be [addressed by] a technology company. Then he said, ‘Why not [have publishers] fund [the verification firms to establish financial incentives from the publisher side]?’ Kind of makes sense. Then he said, ‘How is it possible that we get penalized and then we have to pay?’ But then the result of all of this is that we’re just going around in circles and nothing else is happening.”

“This is more than anything a collective action problem on the industry level. We have historically been very bad at getting together and safeguarding our interests. We don’t talk to each other. We don’t act all together. We have a collective interest here. But we leave here, and we won’t talk to each other again.”

What we’ve heard

“We want to be absolutely sure that we get fairly compensated for the content. We want also to be sure that it’s very transparent both to use [in] how our content is being used and similarly to the users [so] that they know where the content is coming from.”

— Dow Jones’ Ingrid Verschuren on the Digiday Podcast

Numbers to know

71: Number of the 95 highest-circulation newspapers that did not endorse a presidential candidate in this year’s election.

260,000: Number of paid digital subscribers that The New York Times added in the third quarter of 2024.

>600: Number of members of The Times Tech Guild who went on strike on Monday after reaching an impasse in its bargaining with The New York Times.

<10%: Percentage share of links featured in a dataset used to train OpenAI’s GPT-2 model that came from a set of 15 publishers.

What we’ve covered

At the Digiday Publishing Summit Europe, publishers move away from trend chasing:

• Mail Metro Media wants to influence its readers across the entire purchase funnel.
• The Independent is looking to cash in on its intellectual property.

Read more about DPSE here.

Inside Dow Jones’s AI governance strategy, with Ingrid Verschuren:

• Dow Jones has a 10-person AI steering committee that oversees each request inside the organization to use generative AI technology.
• Verschuren spoke during last week’s Digiday Publishing Summit Europe.

Listen to the latest Digiday Podcast episode here.

A look at the publisher quandary over ad curation:

• Publishers see curation as a way to reap higher ad prices than they might fetch in the open programmatic market.
• But they worry it positions them to surrender even more money to ad tech intermediaries.

Read more about ad curation here.

Creators weigh content decisions and costs of election-driven marketing blackout:

• Creators are having to be mindful of scheduled posts going out as political events pop up.
• While some brands and creators are opting to not post for a time, others are simply cutting back.

Read more about creators’ election-related considerations here.

Presidential candidate endorsements boost subscriber conversions and donations at some publishers:

• By Oct. 28, U.S. readers had pledged roughly $1.8 million to The Guardian.
• The Philadelphia Inquirer gained over 4,200 new digital subscribers after publishing its endorsement.

Read more about publishers’ endorsement bumps here.

What we’re reading

Trump Bump 2.0?:

A second Trump presidency could usher in a return of the traffic surge that news publishers experienced during his first term, though maybe to a lesser degree this time around, according to The New York Times.

The post-election M&A outlook:

A Republican-controlled White House and Senate — and corresponding changes at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission — could lead to a more lax regulatory landscape that would pave a path for more mergers among major media and tech companies, according to Variety.

Time’s for sale:

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is in talks to sell his ownership of Time to Greek media company Antenna Group, according to CNBC.

The new Daily Beast:

After Joanna Coles and Ben Sherwood took the reins of the IAC-owned  news outlet in the spring, The Daily Beast shed about 35% of its employees by July and — in the words of IAC chairman Barry Diller — has “had a profitable month or two,” according to The New York Times.

The New York Times’ internal newsroom deliberations:

During an internal meeting on Oct. 24, the news publisher’s top editors fielded questions from staffers regarding its post-election coverage approach, according to Semafor.