Relative Advantage: Unblocked 

Despite 96% of the population either reading, listening to or watching news, advertisers have become more averse to placing their ads within news environments. News publishers in particular have been unfairly penalised by brand safety blocking technology, which prevents as much as 40% of their inventory running advertising. This is leading to ridiculous outcomes, such as articles about football being blocked for including the words ‘attack’ and ‘shoot’.

Bountiful Cow estimates that unnecessary blocking is costing the publishing industry £100 million a year, all at a time when news brands are consistently proven to deliver excellent results for advertisers. The agency wanted to do something about this.      

Approach

Working with Double Verify and Ozone, Bountiful Cow created a tool called ‘Relative Advantage: Unblocked’. Using this tool, it bypassed conventional brand safety protocols, removing all blocking technology. This enabled them to buy inventory it was deemed to be ‘unsafe’ by usual brand safety standards — at favourable rates — from quality publishers like the Guardian, The Telegraph, The Times and The Independent. Clients taking part in the initiative were Numan, Hilltop Honey and Joe Wicks’ ‘The Body Coach’.

The agency was convinced that there is no such thing as ‘unsafe’ content, so put its purchased inventory to the test. It compared the impact on different brand metrics for ads placed around ‘unsafe’ news editorial against a control group of ads placed against ‘brand safe’ editorial.

This approach also enabled the agency to measure how much content would have been blocked if standard safety tags had been applied, as well as to actually see the articles that ads wouldn’t have appeared on had blocking been in place.

Bountiful Cow ran ads on 800,000 articles that would otherwise have been blocked, such as ‘Afghan woman can’t be deported because of back pain’. They found that the ‘unsafe’ content did not harm brand metrics; in fact it actually enhanced them. ‘Unsafe’ content performed better on every single metric. The content that really mattered to readers: conflict, politics, even sport. The ads on the ‘unsafe’ content had an attention index of 126 rather than 120. Brand lift was 40% on ‘unsafe’ content rather than 18% on ‘safe’.  Action intent doubled from 6.2% to 13.8% on ‘unsafe’ content. Consideration tripled from 3% to 9%. Finally, brand preference jumped +44% from 5.2% to 7.5%. Based on these results, Bountiful Cow concluded that brand safety blocking technology is simply not needed for quality publishers.

This initiative is brave, unique, singular in its focus and relevant to advertisers and the media industry as a whole. I’m looking forward to seeing what Bountiful Cow do as they scale this idea.

Rachel Eyre, chief customer officer, Asda