Methods for Buying News in Today’s Marketplace

There are multiple ways that media buyers can handle knowing what audiences content creators can attract and maintain some level of control with the content they create. All of these methods have pros and cons:

Direct Relationships

This approach mimics how media buying was done pre-programmatic, the buyer limits buy to known publishers, whether they be traditional or “new”, based on alignment with the type of content created and the way that sensitive topics are treated.

  • Pros: The benefit of this approach is the limitation of risk when it comes to ad placement adjacent to content that the buyer and their stakeholders might find objectionable. News broadcasts always covered a wide variety of topics that might fall into sensitive categories – politics, crime, war, scandal, etc. – but were deemed acceptable for advertising from major brands because those brands knew that the news outlets would treat those stories in a way that would shield their brand partners from being adjacent to particularly graphic or partisan reporting on those stories.
  • Cons: The major drawbacks of this approach are effort and cost and, depending on the size and scope of the campaign, the ability to scale all audience segments. From an effort standpoint, it takes a lot of staff time to identify a sufficiently large portfolio of media outlets, review their standards and practices, and monitor those partners for continued adherence to those standards and practices as their businesses evolve in different social and economic conditions. From a cost standpoint, engaging entirely with media companies that employ significant infrastructure to ensure that predictable standards and practices exist means paying a price premium. Finally, from a reach standpoint, big media companies with predictable standards and practices likely do not offer exceptional reach in certain age categories and among underrepresented communities

Programmatic with Safety and Suitability Controls

This approach essentially lumps all sources of inventory together and, rather than counting on established standards and practices to ensure safety and suitability, deploys pre-bid and post-bid tools to filter inventory and the domain and content level. As with Direct being the dominant approach to the marketplace, this form of programmatic has its pros and cons:

  • Pros: The strengths of this approach mirror the weaknesses of the direct approach. If you open up your addressable market to nearly anywhere inventory is available it is, relatively speaking, easy to scale campaigns to any intended audience at a relatively low cost in dollars and staff time. Some staff time will have to be focused on how to cut down from “all inventory” to “safe and suitable inventory” but, assuming that the same rules – blocking by keyword and/or context cues after excluding some domains entirely – are applied to all potential sources of inventory then you can see how efficient this approach can be.
  • Cons: The weakness of this approach comes when you consider the potential to throw out the baby with the bathwater. If a buyer doesn’t have a relationship with a supplier of inventory whereby, they know how they will treat a potentially sensitive topic, they will be inclined to create rules that will keep them safe regardless of context. If you worry that your ad might show up next to divisive political content, you are likely to create rules that treat actual political rhetoric from a partisan source the same way as factual coverage of a candidate making a speech containing those same rhetorical themes. The context of the two placements would be wildly different but even sophisticated tools analyzing only the specific page where those two pieces of content existed would struggle to differentiate them. The result would be that a brand wanting to stay away from divisiveness likely avoid the news story about the speech to ensure that they avoided supporting the partisan content reflected in the speech.

News and Programmatic

Digging further into the challenges facing buyers as it regards buying news specifically, Scott Cunningham and the Local Media Consortium conducted research to better understand the gap between the public support of news and the challenges buyers face in making buys. The qualitative research, conducted with over 15 national brands and agencies and over 20 publishers, identified the following barriers to buying journalism:

  • Buyers want scaled inventory,
  • News is generally disaggregated and hard to buy,
  • Buyers don’t want to minimize risk of buying unsuitable inventory,
  • DMA reach, credible content, and first party audience at scale have supplanted iconic titles as primary buying decisions, and
  • Many local news publishers have abandoned national sales efforts.

An Expandable Two-Tiered Model

If neither of the approaches to acquiring safe and suitable inventory at scale are sufficiently compelling given the drawbacks of each, the question becomes whether there is a hybrid approach that minimizes the flaws inherent in either approach by itself. Whether block lists or contextual analysis are a buyer’s primary method of identifying content that is not aligned with their brand values, how any interrogation of a piece of content starts should be dependent on the level of trust that a buyer has in the person or organization that created that content. If there is no track record, pre-existing relationship between the two, or published and verifiable set of standards and practices, it is very reasonable for a buyer to enter a potential transaction conservatively and ask that their technology tools essentially vouch for a piece of content. If there is a pre-existing relationship, or published and verifiable set of standards and practices, then it is reasonable that technology tools should be calibrated only to detect very specific situations where a brand’s values and a publisher’s standards and practices differ in philosophy.

  1. Create a less restrictive set of rules for known publishers, buyers increase the amount of inventory available to them from trusted sources. This should at least partially mitigate pricing associated with premium inventory from these publishers.
    1. Pricing concerns can also be offset by continuing to buy from the much larger pool of inventory from non-trusted sources with the more restrictive set of rules.
    2. By mimicking the rule-setting approach found in programmatic buying, this approach should also eliminate some of the staff costs associated with building direct relationships.
    3. There will be marginal effort required to maintain two sets of rules, one for “trusted publishers” and one for everyone else, but that is far less work than building and maintaining relationships with enough publishers to scale national and international campaigns.
  2. The other benefit of this approach, and one that should be particularly relevant to brand safety teams, is that it allows for a different response when an ad does show up next to sensitive content.
    1. If the concerning content comes from a trusted source, the brand can take the path of doubling down on their trust in professional media organizations and their support for those organizations as a vital part of their social responsibility.
    2. Reduces the chances of a tail between your leg’s response in an open bid/programmatic buy, where the control – and the trust are far less.