Fox News political analyst Gianno Caldwell provides information on President Trump and asks the Treasury Department to re-examine the school’s tax-exempt status on “indoctrination” claims. Caldwell later says that people are afraid of not having the police in their communities.
Last month Target Corp. told a prominent online news editor not to run its ads in stories related to the Black Lives Matter movement. Articles mentioning victims of police brutality such as “Breonna Taylor” and “George Floyd” were off limits, as were those with the word “protests.”
Target and other advertisers who compiled similar “block lists” say they were respecting the sensitivity of the problem and wanted to avoid the appearance of exploiting tragedies. News publishers say such measures effectively punish media companies for covering important topics, as they make less money from content where ad blocking prevails.
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Block lists are not new: Before this year, many brands were already dodging articles with words like “shoot”, “bomb”, “immigration” or even “Trump”, hoping to avoid associations with controversial issues. Ad blocking reached a new level in 2020, first, as the terms “Covid-19” and “coronavirus” hit many block lists, and more recently with the addition of terms related to the Black Lives Matter movement.
“You are devaluing our journalism at a time when it is imperative for us to be the front line doing this kind of work,” said Paul Wallace, vice president of global revenue products and services for Vice Media. Black Lives Matter coverage was Vice’s most popular news in June, but it had 57% lower ad prices than news on other topics because many brands are actively avoiding placing ads on those articles, he said.
Speaker-inspired people raise their hands during a Caribbean-led Black Lives Matter rally at Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza on Sunday, June 14, 2020, in New York. Protests have grown and continued since the death of May 25 George Floyd, a black man w
“The most frustrating part of all this is that the brands that send these things are standing on a pedestal saying that they support BLM,” he said.
A Target spokesperson said the retailer’s ad blocking “does not rule out the importance of reporting on issues like Black Lives Matter or the murder of George Floyd. It is intended to acknowledge that the person consuming that content may not be receptive to a marketing from a retail mass like Target at the time. ” The spokesperson added: “Target is with our black team members, guests, and families.”
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Based in Minneapolis, where the murder of Floyd by a white police officer sparked protests across the country, Target was one of the most outspoken companies about the riot. He promised to help the community and signed a letter promising to combat institutional racism. Target Chief Executive Brian Cornell said in May that the company would remember victims of police brutality. “We say their names,” he said.
Target is among many brands that have temporarily paused ad spending on Facebook Inc. after a public campaign by civil rights groups saying the tech giant isn’t doing enough to curb hate speech on its platform.
MTV, the youth-oriented cable channel owned by ViacomCBS Inc., also avoided placing ads near articles about the protests and riots. She asked the same lead publisher to avoid placing their ads in stories that mention words like “Breonna Taylor”, “Ahmaud Aubery” [sic], “George Floyd”, “Black Lives Matter”, “Protests”, “Racism”, “Hate” and “Surveillance”.
An MTV spokeswoman said the cable network believes the keyword blocklist in question was for “Revenge Prank” program ads.
“Due to the comic nature of the show … we didn’t want to be insensitive by placing ads next to important and serious topics like Black Lives Matter,” he said. “This is standard practice that we use with our media agency to ensure that our ads do not appear deaf or disrespectful.”
A Target employee returns the shopping carts from the parking lot, in Omaha, Nebraska, on Tuesday, June 16, 2020. (AP Photo / Nati Harnik)
Brands maintain keyword blocking lists because they don’t always buy ads targeting specific websites. In contrast, in automated ad buying, they often target certain types of audiences or content types, and intermediaries target their ads to sites that match those characteristics. Block lists help brokers and publishers to remove certain ad placements.
When Covid-19 took over the news cycle in March, visits to news publishers’ pages skyrocketed as readers flocked to those stories. But ad prices fell as much as 50% compared to the year-ago period, in part due to keyword blocking by advertisers. The pandemic led to a broader drop in advertising spending, which also affected advertising prices across the board.
Ad prices started to rise in May as brands became more comfortable, but were later hit again in late May, when Floyd’s death and protests became the main story. In the two weeks after Mr. Floyd’s death on May 25, ad prices in news content were on average 41% lower than the same time last year, according to Staq Inc., which Aggregates data from over 40 digital publications. Prices began to rebound slowly as the protests demanded less coverage. Ad prices are now approximately 20% lower than a year ago.
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Some brands forgo the block list approach, instead of using technology that rates the overall sentiment of an item, rather than just detecting the presence of certain words. Avoiding certain keywords can be too forceful, said Guy Tytunovich, CEO of Cheq AI Technologies Ltd., which helps brands avoid objectionable content by rating an article’s sensitivity.
“It is bad enough being an elephant in a porcelain store. It is much worse when you are a huge elephant in a small, small porcelain store, as is the case in 2020, when a lot of the news is negative,” Tytunovich said. said.
He has advised clients to tolerate more risk than usual in 2020, so his ads end in some news. But Cheq’s technology rates most content related to Black Lives Matter as too sensitive even for advertisers with high-risk thresholds, he said.
Research suggests that brands should not fear association with hard news topics. Consumers don’t think negatively about brands when their ads run alongside troubling news, according to a recent study by Integral Ad Science, a company that helps brands avoid unfavorable ad placements.
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“It’s not that people are reading about Trump and they see an ad for Home Depot. And then they think, ‘oh, I hate Trump, so now I hate Home Depot,'” said one media executive.
Some companies stopped advertising campaigns because they were unsure how to contribute significantly to the national conversation about race, advertising industry executives said.
“Many advertisers tend to stop during these times because they cannot deliver the right message,” said Staq chief executive Andy Ellenthal.
