The elephant on the beach, Overtone at Cannes
What happens in the south of France in June impacts everyone in media
The more I dig into the media and tech ecosystem, the more the parable of the blind men and the elephant comes to mind. Not seeing the full animal, one blind man touches the trunk and thinks it is a snake. Another touches the tail and thinks it is a rope. Still another touches the side and thinks it is a wall.
Early summer is the height of the event season, and we can learn a lot about the beast that publishers, platforms and advertisers each think we are dealing with by seeing who is mingling with who.
At the time of Overtone’s last newsletter I was off to Italy for the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. Journalists, editors and decision makers from around the world discussed press freedom, funding, reaching audiences and artificial intelligence.
Perugia skews heavily towards editorial people. Overtone sometimes calls them ‘red’ people in the pyramid below; ‘blue’ people are mostly on the business side. Blue and red people often have no interactions – even when they work at the same publisher. They also have separate events, with one of the big blue ones being the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. Overtone will be there next week – drop us a line to say hi!
Maybe because Overtone is deeply concerned with seeing the whole elephant, I am happy to be going to both conferences this year.
But it is a very small number of people who do that, and that seems odd. Blue people are crying out for a better understanding of editorial workflows. Meanwhile, red people are in dire need of sustainable revenue streams. So Overtone is doing its best to learn from both, and to share with both.
The bright beautiful cookieless future
The rise of generative AI has excited and scared the editorial side of publishing, though it also has come at a time when things are in flux for the blue side and its advertising partners. Right now we are seeing the slowly unfolding demise of cookies that suck up people’s personal data, which means that advertisers are on the hunt for places where their ad campaigns can be effective in a more privacy-focused way.
Some major players in the advertising space such as The Trade Desk are putting forward the “premium internet” that takes ad slots from a top 100 group of publishers and sells ads there based on other forms of data, including “first-party data” from the publishers such as the email address someone registers with.
There is also “contextual” data about where the ad is being placed, such as Overtone data about the content itself. I expect to have both of these topics to be big at Cannes and am particularly interested in where these conversations touch on AI. Before when all you had was a hammer (clicks, shares, keywords) everything was a nail (a way to count those metrics, like in cookies), but now there is an entirely new box of tools.
Brand safety and keywords
One of the big trends for the advertising side that editorial people should also be aware of is that not insignificant percentages of articles that could have advertising are blocked from receiving it because of concerns about safety for the brand’s reputation.
Brand safety has been on the rise as big companies and their agencies want to avoid things like promoting and funding conspiracy theories, or putting their campaigns in a place that would create a bad impression. Think of an airline that doesn’t want to tell you about its new deal on summer flights next to an article about a plane crash.
It’s a very reasonable idea, though has run into some issues in practice, with keywords added to blocklists that end up cutting off huge numbers of articles from being funded. If you blocked the keyword “shooting” for example, you would block some crime articles, but you could also end up blocking huge amounts of articles about football and the upcoming Euro 2024 tournament.
Even when the blocking systems work as intended, the fact that they use keywords, and keywords are a very blunt instrument, means that the baby can be thrown out with the bathwater.
The three articles below all come from a reputable publisher, CNN, and all three of them were blocked because of “Conspiracy Theories.” But when you look at the articles themselves you can see that they are not a monolith and there is additional nuance needed. This article about Taylor Swift conspiracy theories around the Super Bowl quotes extensively from conspiracy theorists talking about the pop star. Overtone’s systems, based on the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) standard, say that it is high risk because even if CNN is reputable, actual conspiracy theories are being shared and advertisers may not want to be a part of that.
The other two however, do not actively share conspiracy theories. CNN’s article about Rudy Giuliani’s radio show being canceled makes mention of conspiracy theories that led to court cases against the former mayor, but does not delve into them. The article is essentially about the radio show and Overtone’s model rates it “Low Risk” according to the GARM standard.
The third article shows just how far keyword blocking can go, to the point of being a little silly. Ryan Gosling appeared on Saturday Night Live in a sketch about alien abductions, but the article was blocked on the grounds of “conspiracy theories,” presumably because of the aliens. Overtone would rate it No Risk, and most advertisers would probably be perfectly fine having their ad on that article.
Questions are being raised about how to make this whole process smarter, and Cannes will be the place to have them. If you are there, please reach out to have a chat!
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