Publishers in the U.S. seem to have discovered that advertisers don’t want to face editorials that are negative or controversial. “Forty percent of the Washington Post‘s material is deemed unsafe at any given time,” said Johanna Mayer-Jones, the paper’s chief advertising officer.
Wrote the January 2, 2025 edition of the Wall Street Journal, ” Marketers have long been wary about running ads in the news media, concerned that their brands will land next to pieces about terrorism or plane crashes or polarizing political stories.”
According to the WSJ, publishers like The New York Times, the Post, and the WSJ itself are promoting studies showing that ads adjacent to stories covering politics or gun shootings performed as effectively.
This issue is not new at VideoAge, since in the 1980s, Worldvision’s Bert Cohen — a major advertiser: in October 1986, the company ran 22 consecutive ad pages in VideoAge — would instruct his marketing team not to place any ads next to the My 2¢ editorial page, which he considered controversial, despite acknowledging that it was (and still is) a very popular feature.
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