With the closure of Jezebel, one of the prominent feminist voices in digital media, the spotlight is on “brand safety” and “suitability” What do these terms mean, and how do they impact journalism?
Jason Koebler ve Emanuel Maiberg / 404 media
In his email to staff about the decision to shut down Jezebel and lay off its staff G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller said that “our business model and the audiences we serve across our network did not align with Jezebel’s.”
Lauren Tousignant, Jezebel’s interim editor in chief, told 404 Media that Jezebel was told “brand safety,” the fact that advertisers don’t want to be next to the type of content Jezebel was publishing, was “one of the biggest factors” that led G/O to stop publishing the site and lay off its staff. Tousignant said that a couple of weeks ago, the ads sales team asked if it could remove Jezebel’s tagline—“Sex. Celebrity. Politics. With Teeth”—from the site.
“They took it off because they’re like, let’s see if this makes a huge difference,” Tousignant said. “So yeah, it was very much the problem here that no one will advertise on Jezebel because we cover sex and abortion. I know taking the tagline off was to see if the algorithm advertising would change. After it was removed one of the editorial directors was like, ‘I’m seeing an ad for J Crew for the first time ever, maybe this will be good.’”
G/O Media has a long history of destroying or otherwise undermining the work of beloved media outlets that have done incredibly important work. Spanfeller blames, as is seemingly required in every CEO layoff notice, “economic headwinds” and “macroeconomic news.” Spanfeller and Great Hill Partners have, surely, mismanaged Jezebel in ways both big and small, and Spanfeller and G/O haven’t given anyone a reason to take their words at face value, but the subtext here is that Jezebel’s content was hard to sufficiently monetize.
This should not be the case considering that millions of people read it and chose, specifically, to visit Jezebel every month. But this is unfortunately how the internet works now, and has for a long time: News terrifies brands big and small, to the point where “brand safety” and “brand suitability” have become gigantic industries that have brought even giants like Facebook and Google to heel.
In theory, the “free market” should reward publications that are doing important work. The more people care about a given issue the more they’ll read news stories about it, which should give publications covering it traffic and ad dollars. In reality, the advertising industry has singled out the issues the audience cares about most, like reproductive rights, as unsuitable to sell ads against, even though a ton of people want to read about them. This helps explain the precarity of publications like Jezebel, despite it being more vital to its audience than ever.
The death of Jezebel under this set of circumstances is particularly cruel considering that voters overwhelmingly voted to enshrine abortion protections and against politicians who made the dehumanization of trans people one of their key policies.
“The closure of Jezebel also underscores fundamental flaws in the ad-supported media model where concerns about ‘brand safety’ limit monetizing content about the biggest, most important stories of the day—stories that create huge traffic because people read and share them,” Jezebel staff said in a statement from its union, the Writers Guild of America. “A well-run company would have moved away from an advertising model, but instead they are shuttering the brand entirely because of their strategic and commercial ineptitude. Jezebel was a good website.”
G/O Media provided 404 Media with the memo it sent to staff but did not answer specific questions.
Brands, the marketing giants they hire, and the technology companies that enforce “brand safety” are overwhelmingly conservative about advertising against news content, in a way that has been devastating to ad-supported news sites. The “economic headwinds” for the news industry that media execs love to talk about is in reality the complete and utter collapse of the advertising market for news under the sheer cowardice of many brands and marketing firms.
“What’s happened is this perfect storm of marketers becoming increasingly wary of getting caught up in the culture wars and being punished for it, even though there’s virtually no evidence that advertising against news leads to that,” Lou Paskalis, chief strategy officer of Adfontes Media, which helps advertisers measure bias among media outlets, told 404 Media. “And so, at the very time when news has become more important to keep the electorate informed, marketers have pulled back from their responsibility.”
This means that many brands and the marketing agencies that work for them are scared not just of the important topics that Jezebel covered, but are also scared of having their ads next to news articles about the war in Gaza, coverage of “Free Palestine” protests, coverage of terrorism, extremism, and white nationalism, articles about sex and porn, and so on.
“It’s lamentable but not surprising that Jezebel shut down because they covered provocative topics, topics that the electorate needed to be informed about and topics that people care about and that attract interest,” he added. “But advertisers are abdicating their responsibility to support news out of an unfounded fear that they might harm themselves.”
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