Brands are so scared of culture wars and controversy that it's ripping apart the media business

• Elon Musk's X lawsuit led to the closure of the Global Alliance for Responsible Initiative.
• Conservatives see this as a win for free speech against liberal media watchdog groups.

High-profile conservatives took a victory lap this month after an antitrust lawsuit filed by Elon Musk's X, which alleged an ad trade group and its members illegally conspired to shift dollars away from the platform, resulted in the closure of the advertising initiative the Global Alliance for Responsible Initiative.

For many of these high-fiving observers, the triumph wasn't merely that GARM — a two-person operation whose mission was to create common definitions around areas like hate speech and misinformation — had been toppled. It was a victory for free speech and, ultimately, a win for right versus left.

Since at least the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, conservative outlets have argued that liberal-leaning activists have pressured advertisers to boycott their sites. But the rise of the marketing practice known as "brand safety" hasn't just hit conservative outlets. It's dealt a revenue blow to publishers across the political spectrum.

Initially fearful of inadvertently funding hate speech, terrorism, or online piracy, many advertisers' brand safety strategies now involve avoiding news and politics altogether.

"The left recentered the ad market," said Alex Marlow, the editor in chief of Breitbart News, in a recent video interview with the conservative media and advocacy group PragerU. "The positive, the silver lining, is that they ended up doing far more damage to themselves than they ever did to Breitbart."

Now, as advertisers grow evermore fearful of appearing next to anything controversial, many ad industry insiders, as well as publishers on both the left and right, feel there's something fundamentally broken about the system.

"Whether you're X, or a liberal publisher, or News Corp., this thing just got out of hand," said Mark Penn, chief executive of the marketing company Stagwell Group.

The shift from advertising across 20 publishers to 44,000

It wasn't always this way.

When Rishad Tobaccowala, a former top Publicis Groupe executive and 40-year ad industry veteran, first began buying advertising in the 1980s, there were only around 20 media owners to purchase from, across TV, radio, print, and billboards.

With a limited number of outlets, mostly producing professional content, controversies about ad placements were rare. If problems did arise, there'd be a person at the end of the phone to negotiate with.

"The biggest thing there was airlines taking down all their advertising if there had been an air crash," Tobaccowala said.

The landscape today is dramatically different. Marketers now spend the majority of their budgets on digital advertising, and the average campaign runs across 44,000 websites, according to a December study from the Association for National Advertisers. Marketers don't self-select these websites, but instead instruct their ad vendors to target specific audiences, wherever on the web they may be browsing.

It opened up a world where every ad impression was treated equally, regardless of where it appeared. As the use of automated ad buying grew, major advertisers began finding their ads in the murkiest corners of the web — porn sites, illegal torrenting services, videos depicting gratuitous violence, and more.

This led to the rise of the brand safety industry. Companies promised to reduce marketers' risk by using software to scan a webpage's content and prevent their ads from appearing on anything unsuitable. Marketers created blacklists of sites they wanted to avoid and whitelists of sites they approved.

But it wasn't until Trump's 2016 election that brand safety really entered the mainstream marketing vernacular — and the culture wars.

Sleeping Giants, YouTube advertiser boycotts, and the rise of keyword blocking

"@sofi Are you aware that you're advertising on Breitbart, the alt-right's biggest champion, today? Are you supporting them publicly?" read the first tweet of Sleeping Giants, a then-anonymous social-media account in November of 2016.

Sleeping Giants soon morphed into an activist organization, encouraging its ballooning Twitter following to pressure companies to stop advertising from other conservative outlets, such as Fox News' "Tucker Carlson Tonight" and "The Ingraham Angle," having accused them of peddling misinformation and hate speech.

At around the same time, YouTube was facing a major advertiser boycott after a series of news investigations found their ads appearing alongside videos containing hate speech and terrorist content.

The furor put marketers on high alert, terrified of an embarrassing screenshot that could land their brands in front-page news articles about funding extremism. Enter the brand safety industrial complex, which offered to quell CMO anxiety with sophisticated technology that promised to save their blushes. Platforms like Google and Facebook partnered with those firms and offered advertisers sharper brand safety controls.

With each news cycle, advertisers added new terms to keyword blocklists, designed so their ad campaigns would avoid articles about uncomfortable topics. It presented a difficult paradox for publishers: High-traffic news cycles like the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine resulted in ad revenue plunges rather than the expected spikes.

The topics getting blocked have sometimes reached absurdist levels. In April, Time CEO Jessica Sibley revealed that its Taylor Swift "Time Person of the Year" cover feature was deemed brand-unsafe because it contained language related to feminism and Swift's album "The Tortured Poets Department."

All this, and heavy competition from social-media giants and others, has contributed to a challenging ad market that has left the news industry scrambling. In 2023, more than 21,400 jobs were cut in the US media industry, according to the employment agency Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

'You can't force brands to change their risk profile'

Some advertising insiders say that while the concept of brand safety is sensible, the efforts have become too focused on policing what content ads appear next to (known in the industry as "content adjacency").

When Mark Penn became Microsoft's chief strategy officer in 2014 and took on responsibility for its $2 billion ad budget, he was surprised that many companies shied away from advertising on news sites. He rejiggered the media plan and found that ads on news sites actually performed best for technology companies, as readers used them for research.

Penn is now the CEO of the marketing group Stagwell, which this year published a study that indicated the type of story an ad was placed next to didn't appear to affect the reader's favorability toward the brand. (Business Insider participated alongside other publishers with Stagwell's study by giving it access to the company's articles and some free advertising space, but otherwise had no influence over its process or findings.)

"We don't want to be in the position of demonetizing one perspective or another," Penn said. "We want advertisers to feel like it's part of their civic responsibility to be advertising behind all perspectives."

But some industry experts think it's too late to put the "content adjacency" genie back in the bottle.

"You can't force brands to change their risk profile," said Richard Raddon, CEO of Zefr, a software company that assesses brand suitability within content on platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and connected TV. "No matter how much you pound your fist on the table saying that brands shouldn't care what they're adjacent to, it's just not going to change."

A divisive election year and a challenging future for news brands

Publishers are attempting to diversify through subscriptions, optioning their content for film and TV, launching commerce and events platforms, and signing AI licensing deals. But for most media companies, advertising remains the biggest source of income.

Ben Shapiro, cofounder and editor emeritus of The Daily Wire, said he has proposed to some advertisers that they buy a mutual fund of advertising, where their ad dollars are split between shows like his on the right and podcasts like "Pod Save America" on the left.

"If you're an advertiser and want to advertise across a broad range of political shows that you think are not obviously violative of your core principles, then I think that also happens to be a pretty good defense" against online criticism and groups that advocate boycotts, Shapiro said.

"I think that would also be, by the way, a good way of helping the news industry generally. I think that would be good for debate. I think it's good for the public discourse in general," he added.

(The Daily Wire is a joint plaintiff on an active lawsuit — alongside the State of Texas and The Federalist — that accuses the US Department of State of funding news rating and disinformation technologies they say censored conservative news.)

In a highly charged US election year, marketers are more risk-averse than ever, especially when it comes to culture-war topics.

Tractor Supply, John Deere, and Harley-Davidson recently ended their diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives after coming under activist pressure. And who can forget the image of Kid Rock shooting Bud Light cans with a rifle after the beer brand featured a transgender influencer in one of its social-media posts? A huge boycott of the brand saw Bud Light slip from being the top-selling beer in America to the No. 3 spot in the space of months.

"When I was working with clients and brands the people who were running marketing and advertising tended to be true decision makers and said, 'This is what we think,'" Tobaccowala said. "Now most people are really scared for their jobs, so their whole stance is, 'I'm not going to take a point of view on anything.'"

The result, Tobaccowala fears, is a further winnowing of the media industry where only the biggest platforms and individual content creators survive.

"The ecosystem will look like whales and plankton," Tobaccowala said. "They feed off each other, but anyone in between won't have a future."