The News Alliance has launched #AskForNews, a month-long campaign asking marketers to stop treating news as a no-go zone. For anyone who buys news brands to sell lots, fights or services, it is a good moment to check what brand safety settings are quietly doing to your plan.
What’s happened
The News Alliance, the industry body for UK news publishers, has launched a campaign called #AskForNews to coincide with Journalism Matters Week. It runs until the end of November in print, digital and audio news environments, with the campaign appearing in The Guardian, The Standard, The Telegraph, Reach, Sky News and the trade titles The Media Leader and Campaign, and it uses a satirical line, “There’s a funny thing going on in advertising”, to make its point. That point, according to The Media Leader’s report, is that 96% of UK adults consume news (an Ofcom figure), yet brand safety concerns still lead many advertisers to exclude news from their plans altogether. The Alliance’s chair, Sarah Jones, called news “one of the most trusted and widely consumed media environments in the UK” and said it is too often overlooked in planning.
Why it matters to auction houses, promoters and specialist firms
Most of our clients never consciously decided to avoid news. The decision was made for them, usually by a keyword blocklist or a “brand safety” setting inside a programmatic platform or an agency trading desk, often years ago, and nobody has looked at it since. Those lists tend to block words like “death”, “attack”, “crash”, “war” and “arrest”, which in practice knocks out most of the news section of The Telegraph, The Times or Sky News, and a fair chunk of the sport section too. If you are a fine art auction house trying to reach the people who read the arts and business pages, or a fight promoter trying to reach men who read the back pages, a blocklist like that is throwing away precisely the audience you are paying to reach.
There is a second, more practical reason to pay attention now. When advertisers avoid news, the publishers are left with unsold space, and unsold space is what we buy. In our experience news sections carry more late availability than lifestyle or entertainment pages, and a campaign like this is a signal that the sales houses are keen to talk. That is the moment to ask for a better position, a better page or a better price, not later in the month when the Christmas money has arrived.
This is the conversation we have with publishers on our clients’ behalf. When we book a page or a run of digital impressions in a news brand, we ask where the ad will actually sit, which sections are open to it, whether the publisher’s own suitability tools are being used instead of a blunt keyword list, and what the late-space position is for the dates we care about. Most buyers never ask, which is why most buyers pay rate card.
What we’d do
First, audit your exclusions. Ask whoever runs your digital buying for the actual blocklist and the brand safety tier applied to your campaigns, then go through it line by line. A claims firm has very different needs from a luxury brand, and a list built for one will be wrong for the other. We do this for new clients as a matter of course and it almost always frees up inventory nobody knew was being excluded.
Second, test news adjacency on purpose. Take a small part of the November budget and run it in the news sections of one or two titles whose readers match your buyers, with a clear response measure such as catalogue requests, ticket sales or enquiry calls. Judge it on results, not on a hunch about what might appear next to it.
Third, use the campaign window. Publishers will be more receptive to a conversation about news placements this month than in most. We would go to the sales houses now with specific dates, specific sections and a specific budget, and ask for the position and the late-space rate at the same time.
How VCM can help
We buy news brands every week for auction houses, sports promoters and specialist businesses, and we know which publishers will negotiate on position and price when the space is tight and when it is not. You can read more about how we approach print and news brand advertising, or get in touch on 0333 577 1848 or at James@vcmweb.co.uk. Send us your current plan and your blocklist and we’ll tell you what is being excluded and what it should cost to fix, no obligation.
