Blocklists Are 'Surgery With a Guillotine,' So Dow Jones Built a Brand Safety Tool

There’s still a lot of room for improvement in how the industry tackles brand safety, but slowly, the move away from broad-sweeping keyword blocklists is gaining pace. For its part, Dow Jones has built an artificial intelligence tool to sharpen advertisers’ keyword blocklists, making them suitable and relevant for the company's three titles. In doing so, it’s grown its volume of monetizable inventory threefold, on average, and improved the reach and effectiveness of advertiser campaigns. In April, Dow Jones began offering the brand safety tool SafeSuite as part of its toolbox of products to encourage advertisers to spend more while marketing budgets were on a coronavirus-induced hold. The tool takes advertisers’ keyword blocklists—used to keep ads away from unsuitable or unsafe content online, but often including general news content—and shrinks them to be more relevant to The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch and Barron’s. “There is a spectrum. [Advertisers] avoiding news altogether is like doing surgery with a guillotine,” said Dow Jones chief revenue officer Josh Stinchcomb. “The default is extending the blocklist, which is still overkill, like doing surgery with a hatchet, but there are scalpels.” In August, Dow Jones had 98.4 million global unique monthly visitors, according to Comscore. The publisher wouldn’t share how much revenue it lost through advertisers' overzealous keyword blocking, but its focus on business and finance meant that it was more shielded compared with general news publishers. A $4.1 billion hole in ad revenue The last six months have been rocky for news publishers’ ad revenues, and at the center is keyword blocking: Each overlapping crisis hitting the news cycle prompts advertisers to add more words to their lists, avoiding their ads appearing next to unsafe or unsuitable content. Publishers including Gannett’s USA Today and Dow Jones expect an increase in companies blocking ads from election-related stories. So far in the U.S. this year, extreme keyword blocking has cost U.S. news publishers $4.1 billion, according to estimates from cybersecurity firm Cheq. March was the peak, squeezing publishers' programmatic ad revenue. But the situation has significantly improved, said Stevan Randjelovic, director of brand safety and digital risk for EMEA at GroupM: In a data sample, “coronavirus” and its derivatives no longer feature in the top 15 words on the agency’s clients’ blocklists. Tech company Integral Ad Science saw an 80% drop in coronavirus-related keyword blocking from mid-March to early May, thanks to more sophisticated AI contextual tools that read page sentiment and avoid overblocking news content. “Overall total keyword blocking is down 30% versus the same period a year ago,” said Joe Barone, managing partner for brand safety Americas at GroupM, due to “reducing exact match keyword blocking in favor of more sophisticated semantic avoidance.” Barone added that about 5% of GroupM’s U.S. blocking activity is related to President Donald Trump or the election. Relevant lists increase yield Even so, blocklists persist and Dow Jones has seen some grow. The blocklist that a tech client provided consisted of 763 words, which blocked 55% of positive articles and only 81% of negative articles. SafeSuite reduced this list to only 42 words, blocking 90% of negative articles and only 23% of positive articles. For a luxury client, SafeSuite reduced its blocklist by 85%. But it’s not just reducing the list—understanding the suitability of the article adjacent to the brand message is key. For instance, on MarketWatch, a story could include that a company “IPO killed it” and the tool would recognize the article’s suitability for ad placement. Using the tool increased the campaign clickthrough rate for its luxury client by 10% compared with using a client-provided list, Stinchcomb said. Dow Jones has offered SafeSuite—which took six months to develop—to over 20 clients since April and about 12 are using it. Over the last three weeks, the process has become less manual, increasing the volume of clients it can work with and allowing it to lower its minimum threshold to $150,000 per campaign, which is below the publisher’s average campaign size benchmark. Mindful that it can be an uphill battle getting clients to use any new tool, Stinchcomb wants it to be as accessible as possible. Still, evidence mounts that advertising around hard news does not impact the effectiveness of an ad. Executives are on average 58% more likely to take action—like visiting a brand site, recommending to a friend, or consider buying a product—after seeing ads within news environments, according to a September study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The issue with the open marketplace Yet blocklists aren’t going away anytime soon. “Keyword filtering is the only method brands have to control the environment where their ads are placed, especially in programmatic,” said Nickolas Rekeda, CMO of native ad platform MGID. “With fake news on the rise, brands will likely hold onto blocklists, but even quality media owners might suffer from overblocking.” And not all publishers have the resource capabilities of Dow Jones. Publishers struggle most with blocklists on the open marketplace—which is only 10% of Dow Jones' digital business—where without a direct relationship with the client, it’s impossible to know what is being blocked. While agencies welcome these improvements, publishers struggle to scale with time-poor planners. “It is a challenge if every publisher builds their own tool ... we would have big fragmentation as a buyer,” Randjelovic said. As with all thorny industrywide issues, the key lies in vague notions of greater collaboration and agreeing on a definition of universal standards. “The endgame is that brands at large take a more nuanced approach,” Stinchcomb said. “If that’s tech vendors changing their tools, then great, or if that’s SafeSuite being pushed forward. But mass buy-in is the important thing; it’s a big win when there’s a scalable solution.”

Digital Transformation

Blocklists Are 'Surgery With a Guillotine,' So Dow Jones Built a Brand Safety Tool

Publisher triples ad inventory as advertisers seek a more nuanced approach to keyword blocking

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Lucinda Southern

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