By Tom Hickey, CEO Northampton Consulting
Allison Schiff, Managing Editor at AdExchanger, published an opinion piece titled: “Can We Stop It With The Brand Safety Double Standard Already?“
I couldn’t agree more with her point – why is it okay from a brand-safety perspective for brands to advertise on Criminal Minds and not on the local news? As Allison points out: “Look, there’s an episode of “Criminal Minds” in which a delusional man with an evil twin eats his ex-girlfriend’s head and brain. He keeps it under a plastic cloche dome in his fridge (to maintain its freshness, I assume). He also makes his victims eat parts of it before he kills them.” How can this possibly be okay when a local news story on COVID, the war in Ukraine, or the rise in local crime is completely off-limits?
It’s not okay and makes absolutely no sense. If one is okay, shouldn’t the other be okay too?
Aside from the apparent brand-safety hypocrisy, I have another issue which for me is far more serious: when ad dollars flow away from local news (video or analog), so does the ability of those local news organizations to produce high quality news content. With all the talk about Twitter and Elon Musk, “fake news” and Google’s latest move against misinformation, why isn’t this being included in the conversation?
According to another piece on AdExchanger, “The LMC Wants To Ensure Local News Publishers Actually Have A Post-Cookie Future“, the author writes: “Whereas Facebook used to be the No. 1 referral source for local news traffic, said Chris Fehrmann, a newly appointed LMC (Local Media Consortium) board member and VP of digital products at TEGNA, that traffic has dropped 40% to 60% over the past two years.” While there are other contributing factors, primarily Apple’s ATT, brand safety is squarely in the mix.
The logical conclusion for me coming out of all of this: if local news is able to recoup some of the lost ad dollars due to brand-safety concerns, they could reinvest some or all of that money in high quality journalism, which would eventually get pushed out on social media. The result: credible (or at least more credible) news on Facebook et al. Imagine that.
As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts.
#adexchanger #news #localnews #journalism #social #meta #google #brandsafety #hypocrisy #wecandobetter
Northampton Consulting 