We live in increasingly divisive times, where stark diversity of opinion seems to occur over countless issues. This is reflected in our media channels where TV channels and news publications fall down hard on one side of an argument - often political.

At a time when politics dominates our media consumption, what should any morally-minded marketer be thinking about when it comes to the marriage of media and marketing, not least deciding whether to park their own views in a bid to reach potential consumers?

Context and brand placement are basic considerations in marketing: you need to be in the right places for your audience, especially if you don’t have an unlimited marketing budget. But we also know that the right context can improve ad recall, and, conversely, the wrong context—ads running alongside unsavoury content—can have major ramifications for the brand and the agency-client relationship. Indeed, a whole sub-industry has spawned around brand safety and contextual targeting, mainly in digital advertising.

But what counts as right and wrong context isn’t very clear cut.

How far should our considerations go?

Despite gambling being legal in the UK, it’s on almost every blocklist. Do we consider it unsavoury? Are we worried about participating in the journey to gambling addiction? It may feel like a straightforward choice to avoid gambling content but, when you start interrogating that, is there a moral judgement being passed here? Or are you content that you can probably reach enough of your audience elsewhere to not have to deal with this moral headache?

Where it gets interesting is in more cultural contexts, e.g. media channels with a strong political stance, such as GB News. My starting point is that most brands do not have political affiliations, so they shouldn’t block a news brand as a whole but rather focus on reaching their target audience wherever they are.

But there is a precedent for excluding whole news brands. In the late 2010s, Stop Funding Hate called for charities to stop advertising with the Daily Mail because of its anti-immigration rhetoric. This has since expanded to include more causes and sites, but the premise remains: do not use your advertising spend to promote the creation of hateful content.

If you’re an international aid charity, this one is fairly simple, but what if you’re an animal aid charity? As a nation of pet owners, a lot of your audience is on GB News and the Daily Mail so if you don’t advertise there, have you allowed your personal views to get in the way of marketing performance? If you don’t advertise there, are you alienating your potential customers who have different points of view from you? The choice is not a straightforward one; each brand needs to take an individual decision on where to draw the line between their morals and chasing performance.

What of the reputational risk? 

The reason all this matters is reputational risk. Going back to the inception of Stop Funding Hate, charities had a lot of supporters who weren’t happy that they were advertising on these sites so it seemed reputational risk could indeed have a financial impact. Certainly, research shows that brand preference can influence profits but, as I’m sure you’re picking up, it’s never that straightforward.

Remember Protein World’s infamous “Beach Body Ready” campaign in 2016? There was global uproar at the unrealistic beauty standards it promoted, and while one would argue that they created a huge reputational risk, they also reported £1m in sales in the four days after the campaign. So they basically shrugged and leaned into the strategy.

There was enough of an audience available to them that didn’t care about (or even liked) the body shaming, for it to be a successful campaign. This is a powerful example of the disparity between personal morals and where people actually put their money.

To be clear, I’m not advocating for dismissing reputational risk, but rather for understanding where the line is between yourself as a marketer and your audience.

Navigating the balance for inclusivity 

News brands see a significant percentage of their inventory not receive any ad calls from programmatic advertising, generally due to programmatic blocklists, as news brands naturally cover a lot of negative events that would be captured by exclusions.

But this can be quite a ham-fisted technique as it struggles with nuance, which can become a problem in more culturally sensitive contexts. A lot of blocklists will include content relating to transgender issues, for example, because there’s a lot of hateful content online around this topic and brands don’t want to be supporting hate speech. Good idea, no?

Unfortunately, a lot of tech will also block the positive contexts as it can’t differentiate between the two. Not so good. Ad revenue can be seen as a success metric for content – if more money is made from a particular article then you’d be inclined to write more content on that topic. So if we’re (unintentionally) blocking positive articles about transgender people, we’re feeding into a vicious cycle of exclusion of minorities. That’s quite the catch-22.

Happily, in this instance, there are technological solutions, such as opting to use curated networks of minority-owned websites in your marketing strategy or employing brand safety tech that’s better able to understand semantics, which comes with reduced risks.

As you will have gleaned by now, there are few hard rights and wrongs when it comes to advertising against content that is perfectly legal but may not speak to you as a person. So perhaps it is about looking at each case individually and applying that illusive consideration and nuance that is, ironically, increasingly absent in a lot of public discourse in 2024.