Publishers in the U.S. seem to have discovered that advertisers don’t want to face editorials that are negative or controversial. “Forty percent of the Washington Post‘s material is deemed unsafe at any given time,” said Johanna Mayer-Jones, the paper’s Chief Advertising Officer. The Post is owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
An article in the January 2, 2025 edition of the Wall Street Journal explained that “Marketers have long been wary about running ads in the news media, concerned that their brands will land next to pieces about terrorism or plane crashes or polarizing political stories.”
According to the WSJ, publishers like The New York Times, the Post, and the WSJ itself, are promoting studies showing that ads adjacent to stories covering politics or gun shootings performed as effectively.
This issue is not new to us at VideoAge. In the 1980s, Worldvision’s Bert Cohen, a major advertiser (who, in October 1986 ran 22 consecutives ad pages in VideoAge), would instruct his marketing executive not to place his ads next to the My2¢ editorial page that he considered controversial, even though he acknowledged that it was (and still is) a popular feature.
The WSJ also reported that Microsoft has about 2,000 blacklisted words that their ads are not to appear near, and that the publisher of Garden & Gun is considering abbreviating the title to G&G since “guns” are polarizing. This is despite the fact that the publication is actually about sports like skeet shooting and hunting.
Ultimately, the marketers are hoping that advertisers “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
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