Ashleigh Thomas, commercial director – publishing sales, Nine
We’re living in a time when misinformation spreads quickly, algorithms reward engagement over accuracy, and AI can produce fake content at the click of a button.
In this environment, trust is the most valuable currency.
The News Nation report by ThinkNewsBrands, released this month, showed 78 per cent of Australians trust national news publishers over content creators (who 36 per cent believe are trustworthy). The idea that advertising alongside journalism presents reputational risk has established itself as a persistent myth in the media industry, but the evidence tells a different story.
Far from posing a risk to brands, credible news environments are among the most trusted and effective places for advertisements to appear.
Advertisers are missing out, because they are avoiding hard news without any consideration to the context of the articles, or the credibility of the journalism they are appearing next to.
How the brand safety myth took hold
The roots of the issue lie in brand protection on social media. Automated tools were developed to protect advertisers from appearing alongside offensive or harmful content on social platforms where content is fast, unfiltered, largely unmoderated and often user-generated.
In those environments, brand safety tools absolutely play an important role. But, when those same systems are applied to journalism, they often misfire.
Instead of assessing context, some automated tools scan URLs and metadata for specific trigger words and, as a result, credible journalism can be flagged as “unsafe” simply because it discusses real-world issues – information that is very valuable to Australians. A sports article describing a “pull shot” in cricket can be mistaken for a reference to a shooting; reporting on elections or geopolitics can be flagged as “terrorism-related”; coverage of politics or public policy can be categorised as “sensitive social issues”, all needlessly blocking brands from reaching a highly engaged audience.
Every four years, the Olympic Games generates increased interest from digital audiences, however ads alongside articles about Australia’s gold medal winning canoeist, Jessica Fox, were automatically blocked because the headlines read: ‘Jessica Fox’s secret weapon’. What a missed opportunity.
Across the publishing industry, hundreds of thousands of eyeballs were trained on those stories, yet the auto-blocking kicked in and brands missed out.
Ads were automatically blocked because the headlines read: ‘Jessica Fox’s secret weapon’. Image: supplied
The irony is that the very moments when audiences are flocking to trusted journalism – major news developments, elections or significant sporting events – are often the same moments advertisers are being excluded from. News Nation revealed readers are more than six times more likely to remember a brand they encounter in a news environment.
The data doesn’t support avoiding news
For an industry that prides itself on data-driven decision making, the evidence that brands are damaged by appearing next to news content is remarkably thin. In fact, studies suggest the issue is a fallacy.
A study looking at advertising next to topics such as the COVID-19 pandemic and ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests, and then measuring recall and purchase intent, found there was no difference between advertising alongside hard and soft news.
A US-study of more than 50,000 people also found that average brand metric scores were almost identical when ads appeared alongside hard news compared with lighter content. Simply put, advertising next to hard news performs just as well as it does next to lighter news.
The idea that negative sentiment transfers from news content to advertising simply isn’t supported by the evidence. 85 per cent of Australians report they feel more confident about a brand when they see it in news media.
The real risk for brands
While the perceived risks of advertising in news are often overstated, the risks in the broader digital ecosystem are real. Unregulated environments such as social media contain misinformation, conspiracy theories and harmful content: the very contexts that brand safety tools were designed for.
Research from Integral Ad Science, a global leader in media measurement, shows that seven in ten consumers are unlikely to purchase from a brand that appears next to unsafe content. That’s where brand safety tools are most valuable; journalism is fundamentally different.
Newsrooms operate within professional editorial frameworks. Stories are fact-checked, sub-edited, accountable and subject to clear standards.
As the new editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Jordan Baker, wrote earlier this month: “The Herald stands for balance, rigour and evidence in an increasingly polarised world. We, like you, value nuance and curiosity over simplicity and certainty. We publish different perspectives because we believe civilised debate is essential to a healthy democracy”.
That context and credibility matters. Reducing brand safety to a set of automated keyword filters misses nuance entirely.
The cost of caution
When advertising is automatically blocked, the consequences are significant for brands and for society. Advertisers lose access to highly engaged audiences at moments of peak attention, and they miss out on high-trust environments that provide a halo of heightened receptivity for the advertising that appears there.
In turn, publishers lose revenue that helps sustain professional journalism and the broader information ecosystem weakens.
Quality journalism underpins democracy. At a time when misinformation spreads rapidly and trusted reporting is more important than ever, diverting advertising investment away from credible news environments carries real implications.
It also means brands are missing out on engaging with audiences more willing to remember their ad, and in turn more likely to form an intent to purchase.
A better way forward
The future of brand safety shouldn’t be about avoiding individual keywords. It should continue to evolve to detect and be informed by context.
News environments offer something fundamentally different to the open web – editorial accountability, trusted relationships with audiences and a high-attention environment where people actively seek information they can rely on. That creates safety by design, not simply by algorithm.
For advertisers and agencies looking to build brands in environments that audiences respect, credible journalism should not be treated as a risk. It should be recognised as one of the most valuable and crucial environments available.
Feature Image- Ashleigh Thomas, commercial director – publishing sales, Nine: supplied