CANNES — In recent years, many ad buyers swerved news sites, spooked that the negativity of reality may somehow create negative brand correlation.
Thanks to the education work of many publishers and vendors, the industry may now be emerging from that period.
And that’s for good reasons, says Mindshare North America CEO Amanda Richman. In this video interview with Tameka Kee for Beet.TV, Richman says it not only is it possible to buy ads in news with safety, it is also a diversity booster.
Warming-up to diverse publishers
“News too often wasn’t the context that advertisers wanted to be engaged in because they felt it wasn’t brand-safe or brand-suitable,” Richman says.
“They would create keyword lists that would basically have them opt out of those.
“(That) created a missed opportunity for diverse publishers to have that ad model support more content creation of content that connects with those communities.
“We’re starting to thankfully see this shift.”
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In 2021, GroupM said 20 companies committed to spend at least 2% of their total annual media budgets in Black-owned media through GroupM’s Media Inclusion Initiative.
Richman explains; “Things that we have done in GroupM is really to look at ‘how do we take a more aggregated view of news and understand the kind of context signals that we could better match our advertisers with with new marketplaces?’.
“It’s a private marketplace that supports local journalism and therefore allows our advertisers to play in the space of news in a way that they feel comfortable with, because we’ve had enough of that vetting of content to match what their objectives are.”
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