Why do advertisers swim in dangerous waters?
Opinion
Real brand safety means choosing media environments, like news, that stop harmful content at source — not environments that brag about their clean-up operations.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has a great analogy for how social platforms moderate harmful content.
The platforms celebrate the amount of bad stuff they remove. They don’t talk so much about stopping it being there in the first place.
This, said Haidt, is like a beach showing how safe they are by celebrating the number of sharks they pull from the water. Fifty sharks a week, 100 sharks a week… making it safe, right? That’s good moderation of the water’s contents.
But I still don’t want to swim there. Would you? I want to swim at the beach that has a shark net.
Social media platforms have been consciously designed without shark nets. It’s a choice. And yet 50 years after Jaws popularised the phrase “don’t go in the water”, a generation of marketers are frolicking in shark-infested waters rather than swimming at safe beaches.
Because that’s what the regulations and moderation are in news media: a shark net.
Crisis posing as competence
A recent Warc report shows $16bn has been pulled from news brands over the past five years. That’s a massive exodus from institutions with professional editorial standards.
The contradiction was openly discussed in Cannes: 30% of German tabloid Bild‘s advertising inventory gets routinely blocked. Half of The Wall Street Journal’s placements land on “blanket blocked lists”.
Meanwhile, advertising spend keeps flowing to platforms that literally brag about their harmful content removal numbers. Meta proudly announces removing millions of pieces of harmful content every single day. TikTok boasts about takedown numbers in the billions.
But hang on — if you’re removing billions of pieces of harmful content, doesn’t that suggest your waters are absolutely teeming with sharks? It’s crisis posing as competence.
The platforms’ sleight of hand
It’s clever. Platforms have turned their biggest problem into their biggest selling point. They’ve convinced advertisers that high removal numbers prove effective safety rather than dangerous conditions.
Really, it’s brilliant marketing. Instead of asking “Why are there so many sharks in your water?”, advertisers now ask: “How good are you at catching them?”
News media works differently. It prevents most dangerous content from getting in through editorial standards and fact-checking. It’s like having a proper shark net — most of the bad stuff never makes it to swimmers.
But upstream prevention doesn’t generate impressive statistics to wave around.
And the reasons given in Cannes for avoiding news make little sense when you think about them.
People talked about their concerns of appearing next to professional journalism covering real events. But they’re perfectly happy advertising on platforms where the safety measures consist entirely of trying to catch dangerous content after it’s already swimming around users.
Misinformation, hate speech, extremist content — it’s all there until someone spots it and reports it. Even then there’s no guarantee about the speed at which it will be removed.
Sacrificing proven performance
Brands may think they’re playing it safe by avoiding news, but they’re actually sacrificing proven performance. Research consistently shows advertising in news environments drives better brand health metrics, higher consumer trust and superior conversion rates.
They’re also missing audiences they can’t reach anywhere else. Quality journalism attracts engaged, influential consumers who make purchasing decisions and influence others. You can’t replicate that through interest targeting on platforms where content quality is essentially random.
A valuable, hard-to-reach audience is right there, yet only 3.7% of TV adspend in the UK goes to news programming. The industry is missing the opportunity.
And we know that platforms are demonstrably less safe for brands than professional journalism. Every day brings examples of ads appearing next to conspiracy theories, extremist content or outright scams.
When something goes wrong with a news placement, it’s obvious and fixable. When something goes wrong on social media, it’s often invisible until it becomes a full-blown crisis.
Convenience rules
Why do advertisers choose shark-infested waters?
It comes down to convenience, mostly. Social media advertising is simple — set a budget, pick targeting options, let the algorithm work. No need for content evaluation, no negotiations with individual publishers, no uncomfortable conversations about editorial context.
Meanwhile, advertising in news requires understanding content, evaluating context, making decisions about editorial adjacency. It’s harder work that doesn’t scale as easily across programmatic platforms.
The measurement systems make it worse. “Every impression is equal” sounds neat and simple, but it ignores something crucial: context matters. A lot. But context is messy and hard to quantify at scale, so it often gets sidelined.
This should be an easy choice
Real brand safety means choosing environments with preventive measures, not environments that brag about their clean-up operations. It means recognising that platforms bragging about their content removal numbers are actually celebrating their flaws.
Supporting quality journalism isn’t charity; it’s smart business that delivers better results in genuinely safer environments.
The question isn’t whether professional journalism is perfect. It’s whether it’s safer and better for brands than swimming in waters where billions of pieces of dangerous content need to be removed every quarter.
Elliott Millard is chief strategy officer at Thinkbox