From the beginning of digital advertising, we understood the value of being “brand-safe.” As a concept, we understood it all along—you don’t want Ivory Soap running in Hustler, for example. But digital marketing is different, because you are usually buying the person, not the site, and you don’t know where your ad might run.

Enter brand safe lists, which allowed us to make sure we didn’t appear in places that were not right for our brand. There was always a general blacklist, and then you could add different subject areas for your brand if you wanted.

For example, I worked with a local behavioral health organization and we were going on digital. We put alcohol and drug sites on our brand safe list….so that we didn’t appear on a site devoted to making “cocktails you can’t say no to.”

I sometimes think that digital is too geared toward affinity and not enough toward change, and maybe we should have been on those sites (what better place?) but there’s still a perceived endorsement when the ad appears there.

Brand safe has had a new development in 2020. When Coronavirus hit, advertisers were quick to put virus content onto their blacklist. The logic is two-fold. One is, you don’t know what kind of nutty crap that content about Coronavirus might cover. The other is that Coronavirus makes people feel bad and we don’t want them looking at our product when they feel bad.

Then, BLM hits and the same thing happens.

There’s been a lot of squawking about this, much of it from publishers who are losing revenue. There’s loss on the advertiser side, too. GumGum, a leader in this space, had this to say:

"It’s effectively freezing advertisers out of a huge volume of safe trending content, limiting their reach at a time when it should actually be expanding, as more people than ever are consuming online content.”

That’s the ultimate point. Millions of thoughtful, educated and probably solid consumers were looking for Coronavirus information and advertisers were running away from them. GumGum estimated that 60% of that content was brand-safe.

The Black Lives Matter movement was similar. Here’s what Vice reported.

In one instance, an ad agency “representing a large entertainment corporation” sent Vice a blocklist that included “Black people” and “Black Lives Matter,” according to Cooke. She didn’t identify the company but said “it was sent the very same week that the corporation issued a statement in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.”

In both cases, the failure was the most common one is communications…which is to see only downside risk and not see upside potential.

With the flexibility of digital messaging, advertisers could have chosen to run toward those people searching for coronavirus information and provided them a message that would resonate in that context, which they were already doing in other media.

Same with BLM…you’re choosing not to appear next to strong writing about difficult topics at a time when high-value customers are looking for exactly that. You want to be part of the conversation, but you run into the kitchen every time the subject comes up.

If coronavirus makes people feel bad, why not use your content to help them?

Brand safe lists serve a purpose. When we use a broad brush , we sometimes let them stand between us and the people we are trying to influence. When we use a laser, we make connections. Sometimes seeking safety puts us in the most danger.