85% of UK Consumers Would Boycott Favourite Brands if Ads Appeared Near Covid-19 Conspiracies
A significant majority of respondents (89%) said that hate speech had increased online over the last year. Highlighting the brand safety risk of such content, 72% of respondents felt hate speech should be blocked by advertisers, one of the two highest responses for blocked categories. The majority of respondents also said advertisers should block pornographic content (73%), violent content (68%), illegal drug-related content (66%), and unsafe or hacked websites (59%). The past year has brought forth the four horsemen of toxic content into the advertising ecosystem: death, lies, political poison, and hate speech, said
Research shows most of the public are more aware of brand safety issues than this time last year
Last year advertisers – keen to protect their brands – added ‘coronavirus’ to the list of excluded terms to advertise against. Articles that contained Covid-19 or variants of the term were anathema to brands who didn’t want their content appearing against content deemed to create negativity and reduce ROI. It was estimated by Newsworks that such exclusion was set to cost publishers £50m, in addition to the other millions lost in auction against other excluded topics like ‘Trump’ or ‘Brexit’.
But while some of those controversial topics are on the wane or dormant, exclusion on the basis of keywords is still on the rise. Consumers are increasingly aware of issues surrounding unsafe digital environments; research from the 2021 TAG/BSI UK Brand Safety Survey demonstrates that 85% of consumers would boycott brands whose content appeared against Covid-19 conspiracies, for i