Advertisers won’t be guilted into funding news

None of the companies that actually spend money on ads are operating as charities.

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Back in November 2016, in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, there was suddenly a lot of anxiety over the proliferation of “fake news” — this was before Trump himself co-opted that phrase — and the advertising ecosystem that supported it. Basically, the ubiquity of programmatic ad tech had made it incredibly easy for fringe, rightwing publishers to run ads for Fortune 100 brands next to their unhinged content. Within weeks of Trump’s election, everyone started reading articles about “Macedonian teens” who had become overnight millionaires by producing pro-Trump articles and promoting them on Facebook.

Understandably, lots of people were extremely angry about this situation and eager to fix it. It was in the midst of all this anger that Sleeping Giants was born.

Its approach was fairly simple: it encouraged followers to visit right wing websites like Breitbart, screenshot the brands showing up in programmatic ads, and then tweet those screenshots at the brands themselves, usually with some sort of message like, “Did you know your company is funding right-wing hate?” The Sleeping Giants account would then retweet these messages, which would cause a flood of users to come in and threaten to stop using the brand’s products. More often than not, the brand would issue some sort of announcement that they’d reached out to their advertising agency and asked that Breitbart be blocked from their ad buys.

Breitbart tried to fight back against this trend — does anyone remember the #DumpKelloggs campaign? — but it largely failed. Sleeping Giants had succeeded in diverting millions of dollars away from fringe media.

But here’s the problem: it wasn’t just fringe media that was hurt by this activism. The whole point of the Sleeping Giants campaign was to make brands more judicious in how they targeted their ads, with the assumption being that they would be more likely to handpick high quality news publishers that deserved their support. Instead, those brands’ advertising agencies began to employ keyword blocklists to filter out sites that covered any news that could be considered even remotely controversial. In essence, the very ad tech that facilitated the rise of fringe websites was now being used to defund legitimate news outlets.

Flash forward to today, and it’s now virtually impossible to monetize hard news through advertising alone. As a result, there’s a growing movement to pressure brands into loosening their keyword restrictions so that they can fund expensive newsgathering. For instance, the organization Check My Ads published a recent piece titled, “Jezebel’s new owner has a request for advertisers: Please stop hurting journalism.” Here’s what he had to say on the matter:

He had some advice for advertisers who are currently just “pushing out” ads “anywhere except where these negative words are.”

“Find trusted sites and support those sites,” Jackson said.

“I think that has a bigger impact than the shotgun approach that is happening right now, with ads going so many different places — and the common denominator is that they they don't have the words ‘Black Lives Matter’ in the story.”

(I’ll pause to note the irony that Check My Ads was co-founded by Nandini Jammi, one of the original researchers for Sleeping Giants. I don’t say that to disparage her work, which is important.)

So do I think there’s a viable path forward for getting brands, en masse, to include news publishers in their programmatic ad buys? Or to put it another way, do I think those brands can be “guilted” back into the fold?

No, not really.

Let me start with an analogy. Let’s say you have two buckets that have an infinite amount of water within them. If you drink from Bucket 1, you have a mere 1% chance of being poisoned. If you drink from the second bucket, you have a 0% chance of being poisoned. Why would you ever drink from the first bucket when the second one has infinite amounts of water?

The same is true for programmatic display advertising, where there’s pretty much infinite amounts of inventory. One of the biggest differences between the media ecosystem of today vs the pre-internet era is that the supply of advertising inventory far outstrips demand. The low cost of distribution eliminated all the scarcity that once made newspapers so profitable.

On the internet, the only reason one ad platform outperforms the other has nothing to do with audience supply; instead, it has all to do with the platform’s effectiveness at driving marketing results. In other words, the reason that Google AdWords is arguably the most successful ad product in human history is that keyword ads do such a good job of driving sales. The same can be said for Amazon’s sponsored products and Facebook’s hyper-targeted promoted posts.

You know what doesn’t drive results? Programmatic display advertising. It’s been well documented that nobody ever clicks on those ads, and most train their eyes to ignore them. I’ve been writing about this industry for 14+ years and it still boggles my mind that display advertising ever became ubiquitous.

So to recap: you have basically infinite inventory for a product that delivers shit results; so why would brands ever stick their necks out and take on unnecessary risk?

The only solution to this problem is for publishers to adopt advertising products that are so effective that they outweigh the brand safety risks.

This isn’t a new idea; back in 2022 I wrote a piece titled “It’s time for the media to embrace self-service native advertising.” In that article, I noted that every single successful ad company — including Google, Amazon, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube — makes it extremely easy for brands to upload their own native ads, and yet virtually no major publishers offer this same capability. Instead, they rely on byzantine technology that delivers terrible results.

There are a few startups geared toward this sort of option. The other day, I spoke to the founder of Distributed Media Lab, which develops special content widgets that can be embedded within news articles. Not only do those content widgets promote sponsored content, but they can also be used to promote non-sponsored articles from participating publishers within the same network. If I had to sum up Distributed Media Lab’s offering in one sentence, it’s basically Taboola without the clickbaity toenail fungus headlines.

Distributed Media Lab only has a few publishers utilizing its tool so far, but I think there’s enormous potential for platforms like it to provide measurable ROI for brand marketers, thereby giving them a real reason to re-invest in news. At the end of the day, none of these companies that actually spend money on ads are operating as charities, so the publishing industry should stop hoping that charitable giving will save it.