The Wall Street Journal - 16.08.2019

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Friday, August 16, 2019 |A

approach. Alphabet Inc.’s Google has a long keyword blacklist for advertising its own products, which contains more than 500 words and phrases, including “privacy,” “federal investiga- tion,” “antitrust,” “racism,” “FBI,” “taxes,” “anti-Semitic,” “gun control” and “drought,” according to a copy reviewed by the Journal. The list has made it difficult for at least one news publisher to place Google ads on its site, a person familiar with the matter said. Blacklisting is cutting into the revenue of some online news publishers, even though they sometimes can replace blocked ads. The audiences of many online publishers grew after President Trump launched his campaign—the “Trump bump.” At the same time, “they are losing revenue because some

clients are using extensive keyword exclusion lists,” said John Montgomery, executive vice president of global brand safety at GroupM, one of the world’s largest ad-buying firms. It is worrisome for the news business, a sector already taking a hit as advertising spending shifts to online ad giants Face- book Inc. and Google. Spending on newspaper print ads in the U.S. has fallen 32% over the past five years, according to esti- mates from Zenith, an ad-buying company owned by Publicis Groupe SA. CNN.com, which is owned by AT&T Inc., said it deals with some advertisers whose blacklists exceed 1,000 words. Among the words advertisers most of- ten wanted to avoid on CNN.com during the first half of the year were “shooting,” “Mueller,” “Michael Cohen” and “crash.” The most-blocked term during the time period was “Trump,” which was blocked 636,636 times, CNN said. Some digital publishers said the push for brand safety amounts to indirect censorship. Vice Media told advertisers at a presentation in May that it will no longer allow brands to block 25 words, including “bisexual,” “gay,” “HIV,” “lesbian,” “Latino,” “Middle Eastern,” “Jewish” and “Islamic.” “Bias should not be the col- lateral damage of our much- needed brand-safety efforts,” said Cavel Khan, senior vice president of client partnerships for North America at the Brook- lyn-based media company, at the event. Marketers became more ag- gressive about protecting their

and ensure their partners—digi-
tal ad brokers and publishers—
honor those wishes.
“Political stories are, regard-
less of party affiliation, not rele-
vant to our brand,” a Fidelity
spokesman said in a written
statement. The company also
avoids several other topics that
it says don’t align with pub-
lished content about business
and finance.
Marketers have used black-
lists for years to sidestep con-
troversy. Airlines avoided arti-
cles dealing with airline crashes.
Now those blacklists are becom-
ing more sophisticated, specific
and extensive, ad executives
said.
Online news publishers are
feeling the impact, from smaller
outlets to large players such as
CNN.com, USA Today-owner
Gannett Co., the Washington
Post and the Journal, according
to news and ad executives.
The ad blacklisting threatens
to hit publications’ revenue and
is creating incentives to produce
more lifestyle-oriented coverage
that is less controversial than
hard news. Some new organiza-
tions are investing in technolo-
gies meant to gauge the way
news stories make readers feel
in the hopes of convincing ad-
vertisers there are options for
ad placement other than black-
listing.
Consumer-products company
Colgate-Palmolive Co., sandwich
chain Subway and fast-food gi-
ant McDonald’s Corp. are among
the many companies blocking
digital ad placements in hard
news to various degrees, ac-
cording to people familiar with
those companies’ strategies.
Some companies are creating
keyword blacklists so detailed
as to make almost all political
or hard-news stories off-limits
for their ads. “It is de facto
news blocking,” said Megan Pa-
gliuca, chief data officer at
Hearts & Science, an ad-buying
firm owned by Omnicom Group
Inc.
The use of lengthy keyword
lists “is going to force publish-
ers to do lifestyle content and
focus on that at the expense of
investigative journalism or seri-
ous journalism,” said Nick He-
wat, commercial director for
Guardian News & Media, pub-
lisher of U.K.’s Guardian. “That
is a long-term consequence of
this sort of buying behavior.”
The Guardian has had some ad-
vertisers block words such as

ContinuedfromPageOne

Forbidden Words Top 25 words blacklisted by advertisers working with brand-safety firm Integral Ad Science

Note: Data for June Source: Integral Ad Science

Dead Shooting Murder Gun Rape Bomb Died Attack Killed Suicide Trump Crash Crime Explosion Accident Fire Shot Shooter Killing Assault Disaster Recall War Arrested ISIS

1, 1, 788 703 658 621 594 583 557 554 553 525 465 463 456 408 407 402 364 352 352 337 330 317 314

done enough.”
A handful of the surviving
Woodstock legends still draw
sellout crowds. But, like Pro-
fessor Leonard, many of the
166 artists at Woodstock
ended up in careers outside of
rock ’n’ roll.
“Instead of running a guitar
wire to the amp, I ran a busi-
ness,” said Mr. Stone, 71 years
old. Over the years, Mr. Stone
went from trying to sell re-
cords to successfully selling
houses in Connecticut’s afflu-
ent Fairfield County.
He still plays dozens of con-
certs a year with his Stone
Band, a group that includes
his wife, Maxine, a singer. Mr.
Stone is also scheduled to per-
form at a 50th anniversary
celebration this weekend at
the original Woodstock site,
renamed the Bethel Woods
Center for the Arts.
This time, Mr. Stone won’t
be on the main stage. But the
Bedouin jacket he wore during

ContinuedfromPageOne

his 1969 performance was res- cued from obscurity in an ex- hibit at the Bethel Woods mu- seum. “It’s just been hanging in the closet,” he said. Professor Leonard’s former bandmate Elliot Cahn became a lawyer and, for a time, man- aged the band Green Day. Other Woodstock perform- ers also kept a hand in the business. Alex Del Zoppo, who played in Sweetwater, has pro- vided music for industrial films. “It’s a different world. It’s not rock ’n’ roll,” he said. In one job, he scored a pro- motional film for a depart- ment store in Thailand. He’s also done maintenance for apartment buildings and worked for builders. Mr. Del Zoppo’s Woodstock story sometimes opens doors, he said, and sometimes “people back away from you,” per- haps reflecting a lingering generation gap. In the late 1960s, Sweetwa- ter was an on-the-rise group that played into the psychedelic spirit of the time. Lead singer Nancy Nevins said four months after the Woodstock gig she was in a car accident that de- railed her and the group. After that, Ms. Nevins said, she struggled financially, at one point cleaning houses. She eventually found her way into

jobs teaching writing and lit- erature at two community col- leges in Southern California. Occasionally, the subject of the Woodstock festival is brought up by students, Ms. Nevins said. Few, though, know much about it. “Sometimes I just tell them it’s early Coachella,” she said, referring to the annual music festival in California. Members of Sweetwater got the band back together some years ago. This summer they played at a library in Port Washington, N.Y., and a Los Angeles party marking the re- lease of a 38-CD set from War- ner Music Group’s Rhino Re- cords division. The collection features nearly all the music from Woodstock, including the Sweetwater set. While only hard-core listen- ers will likely sit through the

entire 30-plus hours of music and announcements in the CD collection, Woodstock remains a cultural touchstone for many graying music fans. Alan Cooper, another Sha Na Na member who performed at the 1969 festival, is a

scholar of Jewish studies and faculty member at New York City’s Jewish Theological Sem- inary. When he hosts Torah discussions at synagogues, he said, he usually expects a lim- ited audience. If he adds a session re-

counting his experience sing- ing at the festival, he can fill the place. Older congregation members are “all nostalgic about the ‘60s,” he said. Rabbi Eric Yanoff hosted Mr. Cooper at Adath Israel, a temple outside of Philadelphia. The 1969 music festival, he said, is “a great story to pack a synagogue brunch.” Yet time continues to chip away at the Woodstock generation. Phil Thayer, a member of Quill, another of the lesser- known groups at the festival, lives in Casselberry, Fla., and delivers flowers in the Orlando area. These days, his gigs are of- ten with a 14-piece big band- style group that plays at nurs- ing homes. “We bring music to people who can’t get out,” he said.

“Brexit,” he said. During the second quarter of this year, 177 advertisers that worked with ad measurement firm DoubleVerify Inc. blocked their ads from appearing on news or political content online, up 33% from the year-earlier period and more than double the 2017 total, the company said. Integral Ad Science Inc., a firm that ensures ads run in content deemed safe for advertisers, said that of the 2,637 advertisers running campaigns with it in June, 1,085 brands blocked the word “shooting,” 314 blocked “ISIS” and 207 blocked “Russia.” Almost 560 advertisers blocked “Trump,” while 83 blocked “Obama.” The average number of keywords the company’s advertisers were blocking in the first quarter was 261. One advertiser blocked 1,553 words, it said. The polarized political envi- ronment in the U.S. has put brands on heightened alert. Marketers are mindful of the backlash they can face on social media when customers feel they advertised alongside offensive content. One Twitter account, Sleeping Giants, publicized hun- dreds of brands that appeared on the right-wing news site Bre- itbart News Network following the 2016 presidential election, prompting widespread blacklisting of the site by advertisers.

Fearing backlash Colgate-Palmolive is blocking online ad placements in news stories, according to people with knowledge of its ad strat- egy. “In general, our media buying goals are to advertise where people are most likely to be re- ceptive to what we have to say,” a Colgate spokesman said. The company said it looks for “op- portunities more likely to fit with the brand’s positive, opti- mistic message.” Subway said it has blacklisted 70,000 websites, including most hard-news outlets. The company wants to align with “positivity and the moments when our guests will be most likely to consider getting Sub- way,” said Melissa Sutton, Sub- way’s director of media services. McDonald’s currently is blocking hard news from its automated ad purchases in the U.S., according to a person familiar with its ad buying. “The first time your brand is dam- aged, it’s not easily fixed,” said Bob Rupczynski, senior vice president of marketing technology at McDonald’s, during a re- cent ad conference in Cannes, France. Hotel company Marriott In- ternational Inc. avoids buying digital ads near opinion or commentary news, according to a person familiar with its

brands online after a 2017 article by the Times of London that carried the headline: “Big brands fund terror through online adverts.” The article re- ported that ads from well- known brands were appearing on YouTube channels promoting hate speech or terrorism. In the ensuing months, simi- lar ad-placement problems plagued YouTube and other advertising platforms such as Facebook. Advertisers began taking a more cautious approach to digital advertising, enlisting the help of firms specializing in “brand safety,” ad buyers said. “What turned out to be a re- action to protect a brand from unsafe things that are mostly user generated content,” on sites such as YouTube, ended up hurting media companies fo- cused on producing real journalism, said Christine Cook, senior vice president and chief revenue officer of CNN’s digital opera- tions. In automated ad buying, brands aim their ads not at specific websites, but at audiences with certain characteristics— people with certain shopping or web browsing histories, for ex- ample. Their ads are matched in real time to available inventory in online ad marketplaces that can come from thousands of websites. That is why brands sometimes are surprised to find their ads on websites they wouldn’t have chosen. Ad-tech firms specializing in brand safety offer advertisers multiple ways to control their ad placements. Advertisers can block entire categories—“politics” or “violence,” say—using classifications set up by brand- safety firms. They can avoid certain keywords that appear in an article or headline. And they can establish a blacklist of sites to avoid or a white-list of sites they deem safe.

Brand rules Brand safety has become a big business on Madison Ave- nue. Some agencies have hired teams of people to monitor digital ad placements, and some marketers have hired brand- safety officers. Ad-technology firm OpenS- late said so many companies have asked for help avoiding news and political content on YouTube that it developed an algorithm last year to identify channels focusing those areas. Mike Henry, OpenSlate’s chief executive officer, said about one-third of its top 100 clients are currently avoiding news and politics on YouTube. Some ad-sales executives said the technology used for brand safety is too blunt because it doesn’t take into ac-

count the full context of how specific words are used in a news story or video. CNN.com and Gannett are creating technology intended to give advertisers a better way to assess a news story. CNN.com said it is testing a new product dubbed SAM, for Sentiment Analysis Moderator, that uses machine learning to score its site’s content for whether it will make readers feel “mostly negative,” “somewhat negative,” “neutral,” “somewhat positive” or “mostly positive.” CNN tested the system by having it score 70,000 videos and articles, then having human editors review the content to see whether the technology worked. The company is testing the system with some advertisers who want to buy ads based on sentiment. Allison Murphy, senior vice president for ad innovation at New York Times Co., said the company now offers several different ad-targeting options. “We can satisfy a brand that is fine with politics but doesn’t want to be around President Trump,” she said. In May, representatives of several companies, including CNN.com, USA Today and the Journal met to discuss how they could work with ad agencies and measurement companies to devise a way to move the sector beyond keyword blacklists, according to people familiar with the meetings. The “overreliance on long keyword blacklists has a real cost” to both publishers and brands, said Josh Stinchcomb, global chief revenue officer of the Journal and Barron’s, both owned by News Corp. “To that end, we are building proprietary tools that ensure brand safety.” The Washington Post also is using new technologies that help advertisers gauge the context of stories. Some news publishers, including CNN.com and USA To- day, are producing and promoting more ad-friendly lifestyle, technology, business and sports content. “If a client says to us, ‘We are just really not comfortable with news,’ unlike some of our competitors, we don’t have to say, ‘Let me talk to you about why you should run in news,’ ” said Michael Kuntz, chief oper- ating officer of national sales at USA Today Network, which includes USA Today and more than 100 local news outlets. Still, he said, “the future of the digital news space is heavily reliant on us continuing to change the perception around why news does not need to be a polarizing category.” —Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg contributed to this article.

Blacklists

Hobble

Publishers

Yes, They

Played at

Woodstock

FROM PAGE ONE

Ad Restrictions The number of advertisers who worked with DoubleVerify to prevent their ads from appearing alongside news or political content

Note: Data for second quarter of each year Source: DoubleVerify

200

0

50

100

150

2016 ’17 ’18 ’

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: CHARLES PASSY/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL; ASSOCIATED PRESS; HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY Ira Stone, top left. Above, Robert Leonard in a 1969 Sha Na Na publicity photo, second from left. He is now a forensic linguist, below.

The Wall Street Journal - 16.08.2019

Get our desktop app

Company

Features

Documentation

Resources