Industry leaders at Cannes Lions have warned that marketers’ risk-averse attitudes toward news media are costing brands effectiveness, trust, and reach while funnelling billions into riskier social platforms.
At a panel hosted by advertising technology company Equativ and chaired by Press Gazette, BBC Studios VP for marketing and growth Sam Mellor said advertisers are wrongly shunning news publishers over unfounded brand safety fears.
“We need to change the conversation. News is continually put in a position where we are having to defend ourselves against brand suitability and against brand safety, the premise of which is false,” Mellor told the panel, as reported by Press Gazette. “There is not proven negative association with a brand that advertises in news. In fact, it is quite the opposite. Countless data proves that in fact a brand is seen as more trustworthy, as innovative and people are more likely to buy and recommend a brand if they invest in news.”
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Mellor said BBC Studios, which sells advertising outside the UK, sees over 80% uplift in metrics like brand trust, innovation, and recommendation among advertisers in its ecosystem.
“If you advertise in news, you’re going to see high returns,” she added. “If you want to reach the most influential, the most premium and the most valuable audiences then you come to organisations that are providing that information… that guides where they spend their money.”
Despite this, data shared by Press Gazette showed Google and Meta hoovered up around £26bn of UK ad spend in 2024, while all national and regional newsbrands combined received just over £1bn.
Sky Media planning director Sarah Jones, who chairs the News Alliance, said marketers’ preoccupation with adjacency risk on news is misplaced when compared with the risks of programmatic social buying.
“On social media in particular, anybody can upload anything at any point, and any advertising can end up next to that,” she said. “We’ve seen some shocking cases of ads coming up next to child porn abuse… With press the worst thing that could happen is if you are buying an ad for BA and it ends up next to a plane crash. There’s editorial oversight in journalism and news that stops that type of thing from happening.”
She added: “Consumers are not stupid. They understand that if you’re advertising next to an article that’s about Donald Trump, that doesn’t mean you endorse Donald Trump. It just means you’re supporting the journalists that are finding out the news about Donald Trump.”
Equativ COO Jean-Christophe Peube said: “With news, we know that users actually spend more time reading the content and have a better time looking at it than potentially on clickbait made for advertising content… We try to offer a platform where buyers can make the right decisions instead of going for the fast and easy ones.”
Advertising network Stagwell, which spends around $5bn annually on behalf of clients, is encouraging brands to put at least 3% of media budgets into news.
Speaking at a separate Cannes panel hosted by Dow Jones, Stagwell CEO Mark Penn said:“We really feel that we don’t want to leave their dollars on the table if they haven’t at least tried it. We want to make it easy, and we want to make it profitable. And I genuinely think there are good buys there.”
