Be more like Burger King—and save the news industry?
When you hear that the news industry is going broke, devastated by a sudden, coronavirus-related loss of advertising revenues—well, what does that mean, really? In part, it’s because advertisers are choosing to cancel campaigns because they want to stay away from bad news. Keyword blacklisting, a ubiquitous industry strategy, has kept well over a billion digital ads from being displayed adjacent to content with the word “coronavirus,” The New York Times reports. For obvious reasons, that has brought the ad-dependent news industry to its knees. So what’s the solution? Act more like Burger King—which hasn’t shown the same Covid-19 advertising hesitancy as many companies—and figure out how to disastertise. “Stop blocking the best parts of the internet,” a media executive warns, or “it simply won’t exist for us to advertise against.”
