Concerns that advertisers no longer want to appear next to news

According to research by US-based marketing group Stagwell, advertising next to news, a source of newspaper revenue, faces significant bias compared to more favorable advertising environments such as sports and entertainment.

News sites have been hit by automated software that suggests hundreds of topics and keywords to avoid when placing ads next to articles. In other cases, marketers want to avoid breaking news because they feel it is less beneficial to their brand than advertising next to entertainment news.

Illustration photo: AFP

However, Stagwell's research, which surveyed 22,000 adults in the UK and 50,000 adults in the US, found that readers did not react negatively to brands whose ads appeared alongside news content.

Mark Penn, chief executive of Stagwell and former chief strategy officer at Microsoft, said advertisers were shying away from news because of brand concerns, but that these concerns were overblown. “There are quite a few marketers who are deliberately avoiding advertising in news to focus on sports and entertainment. Newspapers are underfunded because news is not monetized,” he said.

Jamie Credland, chief executive of World Media Group, a coalition of media organizations including the New York Times and Reuters, said there is a problem with brands being prevented or choosing not to advertise alongside news media.

Credland said some marketing directors actively avoid putting their brands on news sites, while others find automated systems around brand safety “complicated, outdated and poorly maintained”.

Rob Bradley, senior vice president of digital revenue, strategy and operations at CNN International Commercial, said the “off-the-shelf” software commonly used to automatically place ads in media is too rudimentary. For example, articles about soccer matches are blacklisted for using the word “attack,” a keyword filtered by these tools.

Some publishers have had to launch their own tools for advertisers to use to avoid discriminating against certain articles. CNN, for example, offers Sentiment Analysis Moderator, a tool that uses AI to analyze the context of sentences to determine whether content is suitable for advertising brands.

Ngoc Anh (according to FT)

Source: https://www.congluan.vn/moi-lo-cac-nha-quang-cao-khong-con-muon-xuat-hien-ben-canh-tin-tuc-post314173.html