Month: April 2023

The methods for measuring brand safety usually rely on keyword blocklists. But in an effort to keep the brand safe, these lists often paint with too broad a brush, algorithmically preventing advertisers from working with publishers that are responsible and deserving of media dollars. The resulting missed opportunities for brands and critical losses for the hard-hitting news organizations cut them off from the serious — and deep-pocketed — audiences they need to reach.

Advertisers must challenge themselves, their media buying partners and their brand safety vendors to create more targeted strategies that do not punish hard news if it is responsibly reported, written and published. To do that, they first need to understand the status quo. Then, they can devise new approaches to media buying that keep their brands safe without proscribing hard news or depriving themselves of premium audiences.

Keyword blocklists prevent advertisers from reaching engaged and diverse audiences

Keyword blocklists have rewarded soft content while penalizing socially important content dealing with complex and controversial topics, including hard news. 

For example, keyword blocklists early in the pandemic prevented promotions from appearing alongside coronavirus-related content from hard news publications like CNBC, Bloomberg, The New York Times and Vox. Some of the content flagged included critical updates on what the public needed to know about the pandemic and recommendations for supporting struggling small businesses. 

“There is no brand suitability problem for advertisers being adjacent to this content — in fact, quite the opposite,” Ryan Pauley, Chief Revenue Officer at Vox, wrote to CNBC at the time. “The fact that a high percentage of articles are being flagged as brand-unsafe across premium news outlets like the New York Times or Vox is a misapplication of generic ‘brand safety’ concerns.” 

Misapplications of brand safety also create significant roadblocks for diverse, equitable and inclusive advertising and media owned by and featuring underrepresented groups. 

For example, an agency that might want to prevent promotions for its clients from appearing alongside news stories about political protests could, through a keyword block, steer funding away from virtually all Black-owned media. 

Under the current status quo, content dealing with current and, at times, controversial affairs faces an arduous road to ad monetization. The continued use of blocklists carries serious, negative ramifications for hard-hitting news organizations — especially those dealing with social and political issues affecting the underrepresented communities most advertisers claim to help. 

What’s more, advertisers do themselves a great disservice under this approach. They stand to lose out on the dollars from the disproportionately affluent readers that engage with hard news stories. 

High-quality content enhances brand safety for consumers on hard news sites

The repercussions of wide-ranging blocklists can be mitigated by updating standards and methods for determining what advertisers count as brand safe. Advertisers should look beyond keyword blocklists and focus on a broader range of contextual factors.

Brands should consider how users engage with different media and tailor their brand safety strategies accordingly. 

If a user visits a site that deals primarily with hard news or a difficult subject — cancer, for instance — that user is opting into that content experience. There is no reason for advertisers to block sites covering such topics. Moreover, these sites are generally safer than other media contexts, like a social media feed, where users may not necessarily opt into or deliberately select the content that appears. 

Consumers are smart. They know what they are getting into when they visit hard news sites. If they see a story about a violent protest on a reputable news site, they will not think that a brand advertising on that site is violent. Blocking all news stories covering violence is too crude an approach to brand safety.

Brand safety strategies attentive to these distinctions between content experiences will only produce greater opportunities for publishers and advertisers, delivering hard-hitting publishers the ad dollars they need and advertisers the premium audiences that gravitate to leading news publications.

By challenging the brand safety status quo and devising new approaches to media buying this way, everybody wins. Consumers get well-financed news critical for democracy, publishers are rewarded for outstanding reporting, and advertisers can access premium audiences. 

Sponsored by Al Jazeera Media Network

While it’s now popular for publishers of all sorts to utilize content recommendations to do more than recommend content for their readers, such as to engage readers and as a source of revenue for the publisher, it was pioneered by Outbrain 15 years ago and continues to evolve. 

Outbrain’s co-founder and co-CEO recently spoke with Ari Paparo, founder and CEO of Marketecture; they discussed the new features Outbrain has debuted and the capabilities at the company’s core. 

How Outbrain enables publishers to optimize their content recommendations

To help keep the content recommendation model future-proof for publishers, third-party cookies are the least valuable data signal within Outbrain’s operating model. Because Outbrain’s system is installed code-on-page, wherever the publisher chooses — web, mobile, apps, etc., it can pull in a large amount of first-party data. 

Because contextual data helps advertisers understand what a page is about and Outbrain’s feed can be installed on every page, the feed — and therefore the publishers — able to determine the contextual signals a user has seen over time. 

The feed is mixed based on each publisher’s preferences and blended with the publisher’s content — organic recommendations — and outbound advertising. This setup allows Outbrain to gather a significant amount of first-party data that can then be used to optimize the recommendations for that publisher’s feed. 

About half of the clicks or traffic generated come from organic recommendations, and the other half from outbound advertising. All clicks generated result in valuable first-party data because the most unambiguous indication of user interest is when they click and engage with something. 

“Our primary model is cost-per-click,” said Galai. “We think this is very important because the focus or secret sauce of a company’s engagement is user engagement. Many publishers’ business models today don’t reflect that like CPC does.” 

Connecting content recommendation feeds to business objectives

Outbrain’s latest introduction to the market — Keystone — builds on years of experience when it comes to understanding user engagement and advertiser objectives. 

Keystone allows publishers to harness Outbrain’s personalization expertise and customize on-site experiences for each user while applying it to their business growth goals.  

For example, many publishers today have a feed of cards, especially when thinking of the mobile setup. Instead of having multiple departments manually manage those cards, Keystone enables a unified experience. The publisher team can choose the cards to be managed and establish the objective for those cards to hit, such as driving subscriptions. To help meet this goal, it’s essential to drive up the amount of organic content a user reads each month, which Keystone can do. For example, when the user hits the seventh story, it can show them a “subscribe now” card. 

In addition to building a robust content recommendation system, Outbrain’s deep roots in contextual targeting and native advertising make it a company intent on making life easier for publishers — unlike many other competitors in the space. 

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Register for free to watch more of the discussion between Ari Paparo and Yaron Galai and learn about new available technologies publishers can leverage to optimize their content recommendations.