Newsworks revives Back Don’t Block campaign as keyword blocklist fears rise ahead of FIFA World Cup
One large advertiser has a live keyword blocklist with a national news brand that contains over 34,000 words across 22 languages. That is more words than the average UK adult uses in their active vocabulary.
The revelation comes from the news media trade body Newsworks, which shared the figure with The Media Leader but declined to disclose the advertiser or the publisher who reported the blocklist — the longest it had ever seen — amid a wider effort to combat overzealous and ineffective keyword blocklisting practices.
The trade body has revived its “Back Don’t Block” messaging ahead of this year’s FIFA World Cup. The campaign was originally launched during the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic, when advertisers added pandemic-related keywords to their blocklists, causing news publishers to collectively lose £50m in advertising revenue by demonetising high-traffic news reporting.
Newsworks warns that, given that common words such as “injured”, “strike”, “shoot”, “attack”, and “hit” appear on many blocklists, advertising will also be automatically excluded from reaching news brands’ highly engaged audiences seeking to follow coverage of the football tournament this summer.
Reach, the UK’s largest publisher, has previously told The Media Leader that nearly half of its Euro 2024 final coverage (45%) and 2025 Super Bowl coverage (47%) was misidentified by brands’ keyword blocklists as brand unsafe.
Keyword blocklists are rarely audited, with keywords often added in response to new perceived threats to brand safety, while older keywords are not reviewed. As a result, blocklists can balloon in size, leading advertisers to automatically refrain from advertising against a wide swath of professionally produced material.
For example, publishers reported a negative impact on their 2024 Summer Olympics coverage because numerous advertisers had retained “Paris” on their blocklists following terror attacks that took place in the French capital in 2015.
On the other hand, Newsworks research has found that consumers are increasingly valuing professionally produced and regulated journalism amid what Guardian CEO Katharine Viner recently described as an “age of crisis”, including a crisis of information integrity. Nine in ten adults now say journalism is important to society today, up by 20% on the same poll conducted the year prior.
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Citing Ipsos Iris data, Newsworks noted that news readership for UK national news brands jumped 10% from 22 February to 1 March amid the start of the US-Israel war with Iran. During the period, minutes spent reading news brands also increased by 17%.
Such growth in engagement bucked the ongoing declines in referral traffic publishers have seen amid developments like AI search.
Despite audience interest, Newsworks warns that “advertisers continue to pull back from news environments”. According to the latest AA/Warc figures, published media (-5.1% to £1.6bn) continued to suffer year-on-year declines in ad revenue, including across national (-4.6%) and regional (-6.0%) news brands.
The trade body believes keyword blocklists are a “major factor” in reducing spend. Recent research conducted by The News Alliance (The Media Leader is a member of the Alliance) found that half of agency respondents (51%) described clients as “wary” or news environments due to concerns around brand safety, with 45% admitting they had excluded news from media plans based on assumed client bias.
Of the advertisers surveyed by the Alliance, 61% described news as “too polarising” for brands.
As such, 47% of agencies and 42% of advertisers surveyed said they did not intend to relax their brand safety settings for news.
Yet a slew of recent research, from Stagwell’s Future of News initiative to an experiment conducted by independent agency Bountiful Cow to Newsworks’ own Attention study, has provided evidence that advertising next to news media, even politically sensitive stories, has no negative impact on campaigns. Rather, the studies all suggested improved campaign effectiveness when advertising adjacent to news.
“Readers are relying on trusted journalism more than ever. News is where audiences are, where engagement is highest, and where attention drives results. Yet outdated, blunt blocklisting technology is standing in the way,” said Newsworks CEO Jo Allan. “It’s time for advertisers to put trust back in professional editors and support quality journalism by backing news — not blocking it.”
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