At a media debate hosted by Newsworks in the Palace of Westminster, senior industry figures called on advertisers to consider the social and commercial damage reducing investment in news causes — including to their own bottom line
Bountiful Cow CEO Adam Foley and Reach director of client strategy Monica Majumdar called on advertisers to “stop punishing news for doing its job” by mistaking lower advertising investment in quality journalism for ‘brand safety’.
Debating the motion ‘Advertising is breaking the news’ as members of the News Alliance, proposers Foley and Majumdar invoked not only news brands’ fundamental role in upholding British democratic values and freedoms, but also the significant loss of advertising effectiveness brands forego by advertising in lower-quality digital environments.
Recalling how news brand investigations into advertising around Islamic State content inadvertently sparked a brand safety revolution, Foley’s analysis of the current situation was stark: “Advertising accidentally invented a machine to protect brands from the very content people most actively choose to consume and most trust, while continuing to advertise around objectively far more unpleasant material elsewhere.”
“Publishers are routinely punished for reporting reality”, he said.
Later, in his closing speech, Foley spoke about the “tiny” everyday decisions that lead to news’s “death by a thousand cuts”: “It’s breaking the news every time we confuse advertising alongside journalism with endorsing its subject.”
Meanwhile, Majumdar focussed on the advertising industry’s abandonment of the ‘shared experience’ for ‘hyper-isolated feeds’, despite the fact a large majority of Brits rely on the ‘collective experience’ of news to make sense of the world: “Brands started in the first place as a universal hallmark of quality no matter where someone picked up the product… and news facilitated [a universal understanding of that brand] through its large collective audiences.”
Turning to the modern advertising interest around “eyeballs”, she added: “Chasing [highly targeted impressions] meant chasing isolated experiences, not shared ones… the industry is smitten with the inflated and manufactured attention numbers reported on social networks and online video platforms — platforms that we now know are engineered to drive doomscrolling.”
This produced a 370% increase in social media spend between 2015 and 2025, with news spend dropping 88% over the same period.
Later in her speech, Majumdar quoted Thinkbox’s Profit Ability 2 research, which found print news’s long-term ROI was double that of online video and social at £6.36, while short-term ROI was 50% higher than online video and social at almost £3.
She used these figures to demonstrate what she called “the greatest untapped growth channel” for advertisers: “While everyone else competes in overcrowded social and search feeds, news is a wide-open white space.”
The opposition, which defeated the motion in a tightly fought debate, was headed up by Advertising Association communications director Matt Bourn, seconded by Channel 4 chief audience and marketing officer Katie Johnson.
Both Bourn and Jackson highlighted the key role advertising already plays in funding the UK journalism ecosystem, with Jackson stating that instead of breaking the news, “advertising is building the news… funding democratic society… [and] impartiality.”
Similarly, Bourn highlighted how “advertising democratises information”, meaning the poorest and richest members of society can access the same information through the revenue advertising investment generates.
Both also called on the industry to consider wider trends outside journalism and advertising for the issues facing newsrooms today, particularly the behaviour of tech giants and how algorithms affect users’ experience of the digital ecosystem.
In his closing address, Newsworks communications director Rupert Smith told the room that key pillars of British journalism — such as freedom of thought, freedom of speech and the freedom to listen to other perspectives — were the ‘real winners’ of the evening.
He said: “Through that process we learn. Through that process we move forward together. And in an age that is increasingly polarised, that ability is more valuable than ever.”
The event, organised by Newsworks as part of its membership of The Debating Group, took place on Tuesday 20 October in front of a sold-out audience in Committee Room 14 of the House of Commons.
