‘They are blatantly blocking news’: Confessions of a programmatic sales lead on brand safety filters’ impact on publishers’ direct-sold ads

By Kayleigh Barber

News publishers have been given the short end of the stick when it comes to the programmatic advertising space for the better part of a decade. And that end only seems to be getting shorter, as verification firms like IAS and DoubleVerify add more tools and filters for media buyers to use in their campaign planning.

According to one programmatic sales lead at a news media company, the newer versions of these brand safety tools and brand suitability filters, like those focused on contextual and sentiment targeting, are layering on top of the already existing legacy filters, like keyword block lists, and the result is that advertisers’ campaigns are not scaling. What’s more, these filters are being applied to direct-sold campaigns, like programmatic guaranteed deals, forcing news publishers to try and comb through all of the data to figure out how to adjust the inconsistencies, redundancies and outdated filters on nearly every deal.

In this edition of our Confessions series, in which we exchange anonymity for candor, the programmatic sales lead talks about how their team is working to fix this issue, one deal at a time.

This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.

Media buyers have said that having third-party verification is critical in most campaign deals, and if a publisher’s brand safety or suitability grade from a third party doesn’t pass muster or jive with what the publisher reports itself, they’re willing to move on to the next site. Do you think that there is an issue with media buyers cutting bait too quickly when working with news publishers versus trying to remedy the issue?

I don’t think [media buyers are] meant to be [putting] pressures on us by saying there’s inventory elsewhere. I think it’s more so how the buyers are trained today to execute these premium programmatic or direct campaigns. [This issue] is not just isolated to programmatic; it’s also a part of direct campaigns.

How does this come into play on the direct-sold side of the business?

If an RFP comes through, there will always be an indication of what is and what is not permitted, or what is expected [by the advertiser]. Where there are faults is the carryover from this buyer’s mentality in the open exchange and not recognizing that this premium partnership is not the same as the open exchange. So when you run on the open exchange, it is best practice to overlay pre-bid filters, keyword lists, block lists [and] even in your own creative, have creative blocking tags — there’s probably two more layers I’m forgetting — but these are all important because in the open exchange, if you don’t have a very curated approach to it, you can find yourself in the wild wild west of media buying.

But what has happened when they go directly to a publisher is … they seem to not take into consideration a publisher’s perspective of what our inventory is [or what] we know of our audience. And in addition to that, …read more

Source:: Digiday