The Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro was among the leading voices critical of the now-abandoned brand safety tools created by the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM). It has some marketers looking for alternatives, but Shapiro says on the latest Media Roundtable podcast that he believes the pendulum has begun to swing away from redlining politically conservative content from ad buys.
Oxford Road CEO Dan Granger, who hosts the podcasts, agrees the pullback from content that was perceived as to risky was an “overreach” by some advertisers that also hurt advertisers since political based content generally over-indexes in their performance for brands.
“We're seeing the pendulum swing back,” Granger said. “The challenge that I see is that there is still something fundamentally needed to govern what it is that tells an advertiser what type of environment they're falling into to make sure that they can stay aligned to an extent with their brand values in terms of what types of voices they support.”
Oxford Road last year teamed up with Seekr, an artificial intelligence company specializing in content evaluation, to launched brand civility scores. It gives marketers a number on a 0 to 100 scale with a clear and specific explanation of why a show or individual episodes achieved that score. Oxford says the civility metric will help address the problem of keywords being used to block or flag content that was considered unsafe regardless of the context. “Generally speaking, it's nice to have a golden rule metric,” Granger said.
But Shapiro isn’t convinced that or any tools are necessary. “I’m more of an open ecosystem guy,” he said, seeing the outsourcing of such decisions to third parties as problematic since it amounts to companies colluding by agreeing not to advertise with some of the highest-performing shows. He also views such decisions as part of a larger issue in America today, where people don’t want to hear opposing viewpoints.
“There's a small group of people in the body politic who are incredibly censorious. That has an outsized impact on a small group of companies that then grows into a larger group of companies who then reinforce that sort of perception with the public. And you get this sort of vicious cycle,” Shapiro said. “But I think that's now being broken. One of the things that's happening with the reelection of President Trump and corporations actually doing the reverse of what they were doing before.”
But Granger says that although some brands may be relaxing, he is concerned that it is just a reaction and no lasting “sensible conclusions” have been come to and CMOs continue to make monetization decisions based on fear.
“I'm glad that GARM is gone,” he said. “But in principle, we need some way to be able to make an advertiser aware of what they're going into. This is why we've been pushing this civility score. You're never going to get people to agree on fact checking and misinformation.”
Shapiro says when it comes to civility, the “devil's always in the details” and remains unconvinced. He also points out that he has never seen any brand suffer any substantial hit to their bottom line from controversy surround their ads appearing on a show like The Joe Rogan Experience. “It's almost always a lot of sound and fury,” he says. “And in reality it's usually like 10 guys who Astro-turfed 50 phone calls. I cannot name a single advertiser who's been so brand damaged by appearing on a show that it was a massive issue for their business.”
Beyond brand safety, Shapiro said The Daily Wire continues to look to expand deeper into video podcasting saying he always saw it as a video-centric medium.
“The very first podcast we did was a video podcast,” he said, remembering that it was met with some skepticism from people who didn’t think consumers wanted to watch a video of a bunch of people sitting around talking into microphones. But the merger of the two formats has actually been “pretty quick and pretty easy” in Shapiro’s eyes, who says it has helped to bring more authenticity to the content.
“You're seeing new formats that pop up that are particularly video-friendly. I hope that it doesn't rob the medium of the long-form content joy that it is. I could easily see that because the way that we consume information visually is very different than the way that we consume information in terms of just listening to it,” Shapiro said. “I'm hoping that's not the case and that the counter programming of long form stuff continues.”
Listen to the latest Media Roundable HERE.