Gavin Dunaway is Marketing Director at The Media Trust.
Local media is spreading a positive message, despite the lack of good news for news sites in recent years. The projected $16 billion in political ad spending in the U.S. by 2024 may be a glimmer of hope for digital publications grappling with advertisers’ economic concerns and brand safety barriers.
Still, publishers need to prevent the display of offensive political ads or the spread of misinformation on their sites. Despite the potential for revenue growth, publishers and ad tech platforms are hesitant to participate in this vertical market because of their inability to handle inflammatory or misleading ads.
Still, that’s not true. Publishers can now exploit the risks associated with political ad exploitation to secure a more profitable future while maintaining a respectable image and avoiding alienating key audiences.
Tact is key to understanding the intricacies of sensitive issues and the effectiveness of misleading advertising.
Most political ads are innocuous and typically feature a candidate’s face, affiliation and popular slogan. Yet local publishers are more likely to run online advertising campaigns in September and October, characterized by ad hoc crawling of websites and ads, searching for ads from both parties and also looking for specific and controversial ads from advertisers.
The ads are merely a reference to a much wider range of politically sensitive issues than what is currently being discussed in the newspapers.
Disinformation through political advertising is promoted by practices such as deliberately concealing the source of payment for the ad, artificially altered images, and deepfaking.
Appropriate measures will avoid misleading political resistance.
The potential impact of political ads on brand reputation and page views, as well as editorial and revenue streams, can result in less visible revenue for publishers. However, effective strategies and tools are available to mitigate these effects.
Advocacy requires discussion of political content policies among editorial, management, and sales teams to establish acceptable levels of political content in publications that cover controversial advertising topics such as abortion and immigration. These guidelines help determine which messages and slogans are considered too extreme for audiences.
The question of regulating the use of artificial intelligence in political advertising is a problem for publishers, who must decide how much tolerance they have for artificial intelligence.
Publishers can leverage partnerships and technology to successfully monetize political ads.
Once policies are established, publishers must communicate them to their upstream partners, who will then take action and remove ads that do not comply with their policies.
Political ads are high risk and many DSPs and SSPs even respond by skipping them. However, there are some great upstream partners that give publishers priority over ad quality. One example is DSPolitical, which uses a creative gallery of all ads running on a site to select certain political ads as potentially offensive, making it easier for publishers to skip blocking unwanted ads.
In September and October, publishers can expect significant revenue streams from political ads, so they still have a chance to make money while minimizing risks.
The sponsor is the Media Trust.
