Time For A Reset Marketing Podcast: Insights from Global Brand Marketers · Overline

93 - The Importance of Brand Safety in an Increasingly Polarised Media Landscape

·27 min·1 clip

Norm says an A-B test in the UK found “54%” of blocked articles were “unequivocally brand safe.”

1. Time For A Reset Marketing Podcast: Insights from Global Brand Marketers focuses on brand safety in an increasingly polarised media landscape. 2. Fiona from Overdose hosts Norm Johnson from News Corp, and his News Corp role matters because he works across the company’s publisher assets and advertiser relationships. 3. The episode asks what brand safety, AI, and publisher monetisation are for when news, search, and social platforms are all changing at once. 4. Johnson says he has been at News Corp for five years and works with assets including Realtor.com, HarperCollins, The Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Sun, the New York Post, The Australian, news.com.au, TalkSport, and Virgin Radio. 5. He says his external job is to help agencies and global advertisers configure solutions around opportunities like the World Cup or specific problems. 6. He says his internal job is to help the company, while also defending journalism, independent reporting, and “the future of democracy.” 7. Johnson says AI creates both opportunity and risk, especially around provenance, compensation for journalism, OpenAI, Perplexity, and Google overviews. 8. He says news traffic declines are publicly reported at between 7% and 30%, and he links that to Google zero and answer engine optimization. 9. He says Google is also still figuring out the impact of answer engines on publishers and companies. 10. Johnson says the current brand safety market is “particularly annoying” because an A-B test in the UK with Aluma found that 54% of blocked articles were unequivocally safe. 11. He gives the example of a Times article about winemaking in the days of Troy, around 1500 BC, which was blocked for drugs. 12. He says advertisers, consumers, and journalists are not being served by solutions that block clearly safe editorial content. 13. Johnson argues that newspapers are legally accountable for what they publish, while social environments can become a free-for-all. 14. He says current tools can hold newspapers to higher standards than the 44,000 sites on a typical deal and can even rate a porn site as more brand safe than a news site. 15. He cites Northwestern University research showing 7% of local communities in the US have no local news coverage and connects that to lower voting, lower accountability, and more governmental crime. 16. He also cites Open Society Foundation research that one-third of young Brits think a dictatorship may be a good idea and one-third of Americans do not believe the Holocaust could happen. 17. The interview style is conversational, with Fiona guiding the discussion through brand safety, AI, data, and publisher economics. 18. The tone is pragmatic and detailed, with Johnson using numbers, examples, and industry comparisons instead of broad generalities. 19. People working in marketing, media buying, and publisher strategy will get the most from it. 20. Listeners wanting entertainment-only commentary on marketing trends may skip it.

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