← Behind the Numbers: an EMARKETER Podcast
Behind the Numbers: an EMARKETER Podcast
Behind the Numbers: Is Brand Safety “Out of Vogue” and How Publishers Are Trying to Alleviate Brands’ Fears
00:29:25
Loading summary
Transcript69 lines
- [00:00]
Marcus
Did you know 70% of CMOs are now responsible for steering their company's AI initiatives? Find out what it takes to be a successful CMO in this new AI powered era of marketing. You can download their playbook driving growth in the AI era exclusively from Zeta Global. The link is of course in the show notes. Hey, gang. It's Friday, February 14th. Jonah, Jeremy, Paul, and listeners, welcome to behind the Numbers, an E marketer video podcast made possible by Zeta Global. I'm Marcus. Today we're talking brand safety and how it is evolving. I'm joined by three people for the discussion. Let's meet them. We start with our senior director of briefings hanging out in New York. He's in our studio at the moment. Actually, it's Jeremy Goldman.
- [00:52]
Jeremy Goldman
Great to be with you as always.
- [00:54]
Marcus
Hey, fella. We also have with us our vice president who resides in the eastern most state. It's Paul Werner.
- [01:01]
Paul Werner
Happy Valentine's Day, everyone, and thanks for having me.
- [01:04]
Marcus
We're also joined by the co founder and CEO of Mobian, based in New York City as well, it's Jonah Goodhart.
- [01:11]
Jonah Goodhart
Hey, great to be with you, Marcus.
- [01:13]
Marcus
Yes, sir. Thank you for your time. We start with a speed intro to get to know our guests a little better. 60 seconds on the clock. A couple of questions for them. We'll go. Jonah, Paul, Jeremy, in that order for each. Let's do it. Let's go. Jonah, you're based in New York City, but where are you from?
- [01:34]
Jonah Goodhart
Born in Philadelphia, grew up in Michigan, and I've lived in New York City for the last 24 years.
- [01:39]
Marcus
Very nice, Paul.
- [01:41]
Paul Werner
Born in Hackensack, New Jersey, raised in Argentina and lowered back into New Jersey at a certain age and then basically redistributed over different parts of the US Ended up in Maine, where I am right now.
- [01:55]
Marcus
Just say everywhere next time, Jeremy.
- [01:59]
Jeremy Goldman
Born on the Upper west side of New York and now I live on the Upper east side of New York. So you can tell I'm very well traveled.
- [02:07]
Marcus
Jonah, what do you do in a sentence?
- [02:09]
Jonah Goodhart
I'm an entrepreneur. Paul, I have a second sentence.
- [02:11]
Marcus
Oh, sorry, you can. Yes, quick.
- [02:14]
Jonah Goodhart
No, I've built a couple of companies in the digital space. I'm currently building an AI company as is. As. As everyone. And we're focused on reimagining brand safety and contextual.
- [02:27]
Marcus
Very nice pool.
- [02:29]
Paul Werner
I head up a team of analysts at Emarketer, so. And I'm also an analyst myself.
- [02:36]
Marcus
Jeremy.
- [02:37]
Jeremy Goldman
Yeah, I lead a team of analysts similar to Paul, covering a lot of the same topics with the difference that we're writing these short kind of thought provoking stories to get people deeper into our research and forecasts and KPI data for key metrics, all that good stuff. So it's a kind of fun full time role.
- [02:56]
Marcus
And Jonah, what's your morning drink?
- [02:59]
Jonah Goodhart
Really wild morning drink? Water.
- [03:03]
Marcus
That's it?
- [03:05]
Jonah Goodhart
That's it. Yeah. I do intermittent fasting. I've done intermittent fasting for, I don't know, seven, eight years, nine years at this point, something like that. And so yeah, water's my morning.
- [03:16]
Marcus
A little ice perhaps?
- [03:18]
Jonah Goodhart
I do like ice. I like nugget ice. If you can find your find your way into some nugget ice, it makes your day, makes your morning.
- [03:24]
Marcus
Paul.
- [03:26]
Paul Werner
I never drink water before noon and my morning drink is coffee.
- [03:30]
Marcus
Very good, Jeremy.
- [03:32]
Jeremy Goldman
I do intermittent fasting too, by the way, between dinner and around 10pm and then I have about 2,000 calories. Jonah. Yeah, I'm boring. It's like water and coffee. The more the better in the morning.
- [03:44]
Marcus
And final question, Jonah. Favorite toy As a kid, you know.
- [03:49]
Jonah Goodhart
I was partial to Wiffle Ball, the long yellow bat and the ability to throw curveballs. So I'd go with Wiffle Ball on that one.
- [03:57]
Marcus
Never goes as far as you're hoping though, when you crush it with the bat.
- [04:00]
Jonah Goodhart
Exactly.
- [04:02]
Marcus
Paul.
- [04:03]
Paul Werner
Hot Wheels.
- [04:04]
Marcus
Yes. Good choices, Jeremy.
- [04:09]
Jeremy Goldman
I'm gonna say the Sega Master System, which was the competitor to the Nintendo that everybody had and I didn't get to play Mario. And that's fine. I'm not, you know, sad about that.
- [04:19]
Marcus
Still, Sonic was fine. All right, there are three guests for you today. Quickly to the fact of the day before we tuck into the episode. So which country speaks the most languages and how many do they speak? There's no way you guys will get. This is just so for a context. America speaks 236 languages. It's the eighth most which is impressive on its own. However, this country had to go and top that significantly. Papua New guinea, just north of Australia, is the most linguistically diverse country in the world, speaking 840 different languages. That's 130 more than second place, which is Indonesia.
- [05:10]
Paul Werner
Google Translate interface for Papua New guinea must have a pretty extensive pull down menu.
- [05:16]
Jeremy Goldman
Oh my God, that's. This must be.
- [05:19]
Marcus
It's a nightmare when you're there trying to speak. Do you speak? We don't speak the same. Okay, how about you? We're also on the same page. But most of the languages spoken in Papua New guinea, they're indigenous and spoken in small pockets of the country. Jeff Desjardin of Visual Capitalist was noting this. 13% of people, just 13% of people live in cities and everyone else lives in kind of remote rural locations, locations, small, faraway islands, tribal villages, things like that. It's estimated, though, that there are 23 languages in the country that have over 20,000 native speakers. And then the rest are kind of smaller, smaller communities and groups.
- [05:52]
Paul Werner
Our colleague Mateo Cervel speaks nine languages, so he has a lot of ground to make up. He does.
- [05:58]
Jeremy Goldman
I barely speak one. Impressive. Mateo.
- [06:03]
Marcus
Same. And just for reference as well, it's not a small, small, small like tiny country. It's 11 million people, which may seem small, but compared to America, but it same size as Belgium or Sweden. It's also larger than Portugal or Greece. So it's not the tiniest place in the world, but yeah, 840 is too many, isn't it? Wow. Anyway, today's real topic, the next evolution of brand safety. All right, gents. So Susan Vranecker and Patience Hagan of the Wall Street Journal wrote at the end of January that Meta's free free speech shift made it clear to advertisers brand safety is out of vogue. For context, Ryan Barwick of our sister company Morning Brew explains that Meta announced it was ending its fact checking program and lifting content restrictions on certain topics, all in the name of discourse, quote, unquote, as it calls it, instead relying on community notes similar to what X does. Mesa gave an example of what the new order is saying. A statement like women should not be allowed to serve in combat would have been prohibited before, they say, because it called to exclude people from a job based on their gender, but would be permitted now. So, Joan, I'll start with you for this first question. Is brand safety, as this article suggests, currently out of vogue, potentially?
- [07:18]
Jonah Goodhart
I wouldn't say it's out of vogue. Here's what I would say. It definitely needs to change. I would say the current incarnation of brand safety is broken said simply. And I think that's both from the technology from the legacy providers in the brand safety space, as well as the methodology. That said, if you ask any major brand a very simple question, do you care where your ads run? I can't think of a single one that will say no. They will all say absolutely yes. And the reason, I think, is because as a quote that I love that's attributed to Warren Buffett said is you gain trust by the ounce and you lose it by the gallon. And so brands care about their reputation, they care about trust, they care about where their ads show up. And by the way, it's not just about the content in terms of whether it's the, the right kind of content for their brand. It's also just about performance. What, what's the environment, what's the mindset, what's the emotion that they're around and is that going to drive outcomes for them? So yes, brand safety is broken, but no, it's not that brands don't care about brand safety. I think that's not, that's not quite right.
- [08:27]
Jeremy Goldman
You know, I'm, I'm almost wondering if, you know, Meta, of course we have to realize, you know, great ad platform for a lot of brands, they have an incentive to try to get people to care maybe a bit less about it than they do. So in some ways they're, it's, it's, I don't want to say wishful thinking. I think that there's a lot of validity to this whole entire idea of let's try to get people to care a little bit less when they're spending significant amounts of, you know, dollars. But social media is one of the top places that advertisers care about brand safety and they have, you know, significant concern. So maybe Meta is just hoping that that goes away and they can kind of deal with it in the community notes model.
- [09:11]
Jonah Goodhart
So there's something that we're missing here though, which is interesting about Meta. Specifically, Meta doesn't actually give advertisers visibility into where their ads run. So when you do a campaign on Meta, you don't get a list of, here's the content that you ran next to. Here are the posts that you ran next to. Are you comfortable with these posts or is this, you know, achieving your brand goals, this helping amplify your narrative, et cetera? That's literally not the level transparency that they, that they provide. And so I think there's a, there's a bigger question when I saw this announcement about which was really, content moderation is a little bit different than, than brand safety. They're, they're related topics, but it's somewhat of a different idea. What I have said to brands is you don't know where your ads running on Meta to begin with. So if there's a change to that methodology, you're not going to know what changed because you don't have that kind of visibility. And I think that's the bigger challenge, frankly, in brand safety is that brands don't know where their ads are running. There was, I was thinking back to when I was a kid, there used to be a PSA. Do you remember this PSA? It's 10pm do you know where your kids are? I would say this is the moment of you're spending a lot of money. Do you know where your ads are?
- [10:19]
Marcus
Yeah.
- [10:20]
Jonah Goodhart
And brands don't either because they have theoretically access to the data and they don't, they don't leverage it, or there was an AI that could look, sort of sift through that amount of, of information historically or the platform they're buying from just simply doesn't give access to that, to that kind of data. And so I think there's, there's a broader question of does it matter to brands where their ads show up and if it does, which I think it does, then what's the industry going to do about it?
- [10:48]
Marcus
Yeah, Paul, there was this really quickly, there's this quote from Brian Weiser, principal. Madison and Wall say marketers have resigned themselves to this world where you won't be able to do very much about brand safety or suitability. Part of me thinks that Meta, not that they don't care, but they know that they can do something like this. Because regardless of the new speech policy, advertisers are extremely unlikely to cut back on matter that accounts for 20% of their budgets. We saw that the boycott from 2020, the very short one over hate speech and misinformation by Unilever, Coca Cola, Verizon, etc. Barely made a dent in their revenues. They grow revenues 21% that year, 37% the year after. So is part of this just marketers have less control on this stuff and Meta kind of knows it and is able to do what they want regardless?
- [11:32]
Paul Werner
Yeah, I think they're pushing their weight around. So I think deep down, you know, they certainly knew that shifting from active content moderation to community based notes was essentially telling brands. Look, we can't really provide you as many assurances as we could before. And I, you know, I think, Jonah, to your point, I get, I get the whole part about transparency. There is, there's definitely a transparency issue, but I think there's also a comfort level that brands had knowing or at least convincing themselves that there was this content moderation system in place that was going to prevent some of the worst adjacencies from happening. And I think that's kind of out the window now. The phrase that the Wall Street Journal authors used was vibe shift and I totally agree with that. I think there has been a sea change in the way brands perceive the landscape and how protected they feel they.
- [12:35]
Jonah Goodhart
Are I would actually say, though, I don't think that content moderation system was working that well, to be honest. I think that there was content that first of all, once again, it wasn't transparent. There was content that was getting deplatformed and blocked because you said something or somebody said something that someone else didn't like and, and it was really being used at some level as, as a weapon. And regardless of what side of the aisle you sit on, I think it, it was moving beyond what brand safety was meant to be about, which was avoiding horrendous, truly horrendous. You know, it's, it's child exploitation, its explicit acts of terrorism content, etc. That was what brand safety was, was originally sort of about. And it became, I disagree with this person's point of view on this subject. Therefore we're going to deplatform them. And I think there's a difference. I think brands should have the right to decide where they want to run their ads. It's their money. They should have the right to decide do I want to run it here or there. If you went out into Times Square and said, I'm going to give you money for an ad and they said we're going to decide where we run it, it's not up to you. Brands would say, no, I'm not going to do it. The idea that a brand can control where their ads run, I think is, is critical. With that said, the systems around brand safety should not be deciding on content that they like or agree with or disagree with. I think we need to sort of clear the decks, go back to a time where, yes, the most horrendous content that frankly everyone agrees should not have ads next to it is not having ads next to it. But when we get into topics that there is controversy around because there is and are valid disagreements on some of these things, I don't think that's a sort of brand safety topic per se. I think that's a brand preference. A brand may decide I want to be around this or I don't and that should be up to them to decide. But I think we've conflated the two concepts. And one other thing I'll say quickly is that I think Community notes on X is perhaps one of the least controversial sort of things about, about X. It's something where people from both sides of sort of the extreme, if you will, have to agree on something. And, and you know, the, the owner of X Elon has gotten community noted many times. And so whatever people want to say about Community Notes, it's one of those models, it's open source, and it's one of those models that actually has kind of worked and I think provides a different lens. And so I don't think the narrative that, okay, they're going to Community Notes for Meta, they're throwing out the idea of content moderation entirely is exactly fair or accurate. And I also think it's not fair or accurate to say that the system was somehow working when the whole idea of brand safety got started. Paul, you talked about sort of 2020, and it got started a couple years before that. But when this thing became a thing, what ended up actually happening? All of news was defunded. Lots of people with different political viewpoints were defunded and deplatformed. And I don't think that if you certainly, if you would ask the Wall Street Journal themselves who wrote that article, was it a good thing for marketers to say we're not going to advertise on news because of all of this, they would say no. And so I think it wasn't working.
- [15:55]
Jeremy Goldman
Public. Yeah. Publishers have had enough, you know, headwinds to growth with without this to worry about as well. Right. I think that's a really important point. And I think going back to the idea, Marcus, you know, we've talked about a bunch of different social platforms here. There are other places, obviously, where you have to be concerned about brand safety. But if you're a brand marketer, you make decisions around brands, you know, like, do you want to be associated with the brand of Meta or of X? Right. There are going to be imperfect, the serving up of ads wherever you're doing it, but you ultimately just want to feel good about your business partners. I would say, and I think that that's a really important thing, is that you're expecting platforms to do their best to make good decisions and understand that there is no way that you're going to be happy with every single place that you're ever put, especially if you're a major brand, you know, serving up tons, you know, tens of thousands or millions of impressions. But I think, you know, Jonah's point is spot on there, which is just like there has been a little bit of a drift from what it was originally supposed to be.
- [17:02]
Marcus
But to that point, Jeremy? Yeah, I mean, Wall Street Journal made this point saying even if your ads don't run directly alongside objectional content, some advertisers are concerned that the changes could lead to an explosion of toxic or misleading posts on Meta's platforms. Making the general environment less suitable for, for ads potentially. John, I want to circle back to what you were saying because it does seem as though the definition of brand safety has changed, has evolved one way or you know, for good or for bad. The advertising kind of no go zone, if you will, does seem like it's, it's widened. Blacksback blacklists now are extremely detailed. There was a recent blacklist from Microsoft around 2,000 words. And you said this on our call earlier this week. 40% of Washington Post material is deemed, quote, unquote unsafe at any given time, according to the paper's chief advertising officer, citing an in house study. So it does seem like it's changed a lot. But I'm wondering how much, Joan, I go to you for this. How much do people care now? I mean, 59% of marketing executives said they don't think consumers care as much as they used to about brand safety and 53% saying they were becoming less prudish about their approach to brand safety, according to a recent Forrester survey. And it seems as though Alexander Lee of digiday was citing Pete Bassner, global gaming and esports lead for WPP agency wavemaker, saying he thinks everyone is more media savvy and understands that sponsorships represent a transaction between a creator and an advertiser rather than some kind of moral or ethical alignment between the two. In part because the change in demographics of buyers, young Millenn old Gen Z, they've grown up in a different time and they understand how these relationships work. What do you make of that?
- [18:48]
Jonah Goodhart
Stagwell said it in an easier way. They said consumers can tell the difference between ads and content. And I think that's right. I think that the idea that oh my God, my ad showed up on a page where somebody said something that someone somewhere disagrees with. We're in a divisive time. People disagree with everything. I do think that the consumers are, are ultimately the folks that are voting with, with what they products they choose to buy with products that they choose to engage with. And I, and I do think that consumers can tell the difference between an ad and content. If I said to you if you're a brand, put yourself in a brand shoes and I said are you comfortable being around crime and, and killing? Dramatic, you know, dramatization of, of crime and killing, probably you're going to say instinctively no, but yet if we're, what if we're talking about, you know, CSI on TV or you know, the old hit show 24, one of my favorites from, from back in the day. Now do you have the same feeling? Probably not. And so the, the challenge I think really comes down to context. There's a concept that actually my dad wrote a book that our company Mobian is named after called Mobian Nights. And in this book he says the phrase we cannot sidestep context. And I think that is absolutely critical in order to understand brand safety. We cannot sidestep.
- [20:11]
Marcus
And that is one thing that does seem companies are kind of paying more attention to or tuning into more. Washington Post is one such company that is using more sophisticated, sophisticated technology to, to consider the entire context of a story. Because you might have the word shot and you might say, get rid of that. I don't want any. But maybe it's a basketball story. It's not something related to violence. So that's one way that publishers can alleviate brand spheres in terms of where their ads are being placed and trying to get more context. Jonah, what else do you think publishers can do to try to help brands out?
- [20:46]
Jonah Goodhart
I think it's about being transparent, proactive, and using nuance, actually using technology that can identify nuance. Right. There was an article that talked about a very violent death in, in Time magazine and it sort of talked in some detail about this very violent death. One of the two largest brand safety companies, which are big public, multibillion dollar companies, marked that content as unsafe. Seems on its face to make sense. The problem is the very violent death that this article on Time magazine was talking about was the very violent death of a star as seen through the lens of the James Webb telescope. And literally the article was about photos of stars that the James Webb telescope was taking. And it was marked unsafe because it talked about violence and death of stars. And so I think part of this is we need to have technology that makes common sense, that sort of works, number one. But number two, I also think asking the question about context is critical and having publishers be able to tell that story with transparency. So what a publisher can do is they can show transparently that nuance, hopefully with new tools like we're doing something in this space, but I'm sure others will as well. We're the first platform to transparently show evaluations of content. So you think about this. Brand safety is a big industry. A lot of money is being spent to so called protect brands. Yet the actual data, the data itself of what content was blocked and why was it blocked is not transparent. How, how is that that's the case? If you go to a, a website and the content doesn't show up, your ad doesn't show up because some technology blocked it. And then you ask the company, why did you say that was unsafe? Why did you demonetize that? Why did you make my costs go up as a result? Why did I miss out on this audience? They say it's just how the model works and there is no transparent way that I can explain to you why this content was, was marked that way. I think that's wrong and I think that that needs to change.
- [22:51]
Marcus
They're taking the full context of the story and making sure that the ads are still able to go alongside some stories which aren't what they may seem like they are on the face of it. But then there's also what happens when those ads get placed next to stories which are seen as negative. It seems like they're getting placed there less and less. Garm Global alliance for Responsible Media is disbanded. Now X filed a lawsuit against them, but they had noted when they were a thing that the number of ads appearing adjacent to inappropriate content had fallen from 6% to less than 2% from 2020 to 2023. And on top of that, a couple of publishing rivals, the Journal Post, cnn, New York Times, et cetera. They teamed up with Stagwell, who Jonah mentioned, to ease brand spheres by promoting studies showing that ads adjacent to stories covering politics or gun shootings performed as effectively as ads placed next to positive stories about business, sports, entertainment, things like that. So they are worried about those ads being placed next to that type of content. But it's interesting to see some numbers, some studies being done around, okay, how much of an impact does that actually have? Paul, I'll turn to you for our final question. We've covered a lot about how brand safety is evolving, how it's shifting brand safety to brand suitability. Jeremy, we were talking before earlier this week and you had mentioned maybe, maybe it's channel safety or channel suitability, perhaps. What do you, Paul, is one of the largest brand safety challenges for this year, for 2025.
- [24:25]
Paul Werner
I think the challenge is that regardless of what the method of content moderation is, whether it's community nodes or an algorithm that, you know, per this conversation, was catching a lot of stuff that shouldn't have been caught up in that net. The risk to me is just the having a platform like what we're already seeing on X, which is a lot of misinformation, I think that is going to start happening more on Meta. And to me that's not just something that slips through the cracks. It's. It's willful you know, seeding of purposely misleading content. I think that is starting to become the norm on some social platforms. And I think that point is also made in the Wall Street Journal article that that kind of drip, drip effect on social platforms in particular is not beneficial to anyone in this ecosystem. And I think we're going to see more of that this year and probably going forward.
- [25:29]
Jeremy Goldman
But the reason why, I'll just quickly say I'm cautiously optimistic that Paul is not totally like him. And I might see 95% eye to eye on this. I just think that there's such a vested interest in companies protecting their bottom lines that if they start to notice that, you know, ads are not performing and people are not buying, they will make corrections. You know, nothing is a final decision. When you're running a major platform, you can quickly make tweaks, you can analyze the data and you can course correct, you know, so that's why I'm kind of a bit more cautiously optimistic, I think.
- [26:04]
Jonah Goodhart
I mean, here's what I would say. I would say performance matters. In the end of the day, I don't think advertisers are making this decision because, you know, they, they feel better or they feel worse. I think at the end of the day they care what's the impact it has on sales, on brand love, on brand favorability and those types of things. And they can, can and do actively measure these concepts. I think not to be. We could probably do a whole, a whole podcast on misinformation. But I think some of these topics frankly are, are dangerous in the sense that it depends on how you define these things. It depends on, you know, what somebody considers to be accurate information or misinformation. I would venture to guess that for anyone who is talking about concerns around misinformation, their definition of that changed between when the president's changed in the US and so my issue with that is people's viewpoint of what they define as misinformation is not simply whatever the US Government puts out is accurate. And if that is the standard, then people's viewpoint has to have just changed from one administration to the next. And my guess is what people would say is, no, of course not. There's facts are facts, and this is the case. But that's just, I think the world's more complicated than that. And so I think that it's a slippery slope that, that we go down when, when we start looking at it through that lens. My view is, look, let's, let's remove the, the most egregious content, hate, conduct, shootings, bile, anti Semitism, things that, that are pretty bright line that an advertiser says I don't want to be on that kind of content. It can, it can live on the platforms, but an advertiser should have the right to say I don't want to be on that. In terms of everything else, it should be in my view, based on the advertiser's choice. It should be based on what they decide they want to run next to and they should have full right to do it. My issue is these systems shouldn't be deciding for the advertiser. In the end of the day, I think that leads to a lot of, of harm and frankly it's harmed not just the, the, the publishers, but it's harmed advertisers too. I think advertisers are paying a premium to buy so called safe inventory and they're paying for these services to be provided to tell them inventory is safe. And I think it's wrong. They're losing out on reach, they're missing out on audiences and the entire news industry has been defunded as a result of this effort, which I think is not positive either. And so I think there's a lot of things that have gone wrong in these approaches and so I think a reset is appropriate.
- [28:40]
Marcus
Yeah, some excellent points, gents. That's unfortunately where we have to leave the conversation for today. But thank you so, so much to all of my guests. Thank you.
- [28:46]
Paul Werner
First to pa Always a pleasure.
- [28:49]
Marcus
Yes sir. Thank you, Jeremy.
- [28:51]
Jeremy Goldman
It was great being the second smartest JG on this podcast.
- [28:55]
Marcus
Thank you to Jonah.
- [28:57]
Jonah Goodhart
It's my truly my honor to be with you all.
- [28:59]
Marcus
The first smartest. Thank you of course to the whole editing crew, Victoria, John, Lance and Danny Stewart, who runs the team of Sophie does our social media. And thanks to everyone for listening in. We hope to see you on Tuesday for Behind the Numbers and Emarketer video podcast made possible by Zeta Global. Happy long President's Day weekends.