Brands are unwittingly missing out on millions of potential ad interactions and publishers are losing out on $180 million in ad spend each year due to misapplied keyword locking on news articles.
Keyword blockers are designed to prevent brand adverts appearing next to pieces of content that would damage a brand’s reputation.
However, ThinkNewsBrands, believes these tools are routinely blocking legitimate news content, with 1 in 2 news articles excluded by outdated brand safety tools.
The potential lost reach is equivalent to $180 million of advertising spend.
ThinkNewsBrands analysed 1,200 news articles from Australian news publishers July 2025 and June 2026 for this Beyond Brand Safety research.
The audit found 57 per cent contained at least one term capable of triggering an exclusion rule, and 38 per cent of ‘lower sensitivity’ news stories were incorrectly excluded.
Business and finance was the most affected category, with block lists flagging common commercial terms such as “bank”, “crash” and “dispute”; a third of articles blocked were sports stories. The single biggest offender tripping up keyword lists was the word “Victoria”.
The research also uncovered that “Paris” remained on an exclusion list long after the 2015 terror attacks, potentially affecting advertising opportunities around the 2024 Paris Olympics.
“For publishers the conversation isn’t ‘please support journalism’ and it isn’t ‘turn off brand safety’. It’s a commercial conversation about what advertisers may be unnecessarily leaving on the table,” ThinkNewsBrands CEO Vanessa Lyons told B&T.
“The most powerful conversation isn’t ‘advertise with us because news is important’. It’s ‘here is valuable inventory your customers are consuming, here is why your current settings may prevent you reaching them, and here is how we can solve it without compromising genuine brand safety’.
“That’s a much harder commercial argument to ignore. The report gives publishers solid evidence for exactly that conversation: half of decision-makers want to engage directly with publishers on mitigation strategies and accessing premium journalism inventory more effectively.”
This is a problem, ThinkNewsBrands said because news content is one of the highest-trust environments measured and the highest-attention environment.
Two-thirds of readers are fully or mostly focused while consuming news – more than 20 percentage points ahead of creator content, for instance, according to previous ThinkNewsBrands research.
Other Australian research shows 85 per cent of news consumers report greater confidence in a brand when they encounter it in a news environment.
“What the research exposes is a pretty extraordinary disconnect,” Lyons told B&T.
“Marketers tell us they trust news, they value it as a brand environment and three in four consider it safe for their brands. Yet the systems controlling access to that environment can still exclude significant volumes of suitable journalism. So there is a gap between what marketers say they value and what their media settings can actually allow them to buy. That should concern every CMO.
“And there is a bigger question here. Our research found marketers consider brand-safety controls almost twice as necessary on social media as they do in news. So why are we allowing blunt keyword rules to heavily scrutinise professionally produced journalism without demanding comparable visibility, control and accountability across every other digital environment receiving advertising dollars?
“Journalism has never mattered more, but this isn’t simply an argument about supporting journalism. It’s a commercial argument. News delivers trusted, high-attention audiences, and our consumer research found no significant brand penalty from appearing alongside the higher-sensitivity news environments we tested.”
The fix, according to Lyons, requires the entire industry to think more seriously about investment in news content. However, the ultimate responsibility sits with marketers.
“It’s their brand, their media investment and ultimately their commercial opportunity being restricted. Taking action is simple, clients can start by asking their agencies basic questions: What is being blocked on my behalf? Why? Who decided it? When was it last reviewed? And what is it costing me in reach and opportunity?” Lyons told B&T.
“Publishers also have an important role and many are already investing in more sophisticated contextual solutions and helping advertisers navigate their inventory. But publishers cannot solve this alone.
“The industry doesn’t need less brand safety. It needs much smarter brand suitability, and far greater accountability for the decisions being made in advertisers’ names.”
But, according to reporting in The Guardian, it seems brand safety tools are just as capable of failing to stop the bad getting in as they are preventing the good.
Two weeks ago, a number of articles were published across a variety of websites after three women were allegedly murdered in unrelated incidents and police allege a mother stabbed her three children the following day.
Articles about the incidents were published on a number of Australian news websites — including The Guardian — where readers were confronted by ads for blood-soaked costume shirts.
The shirts are sold under titles containing the words “bloody” and “halloween” by online clothing retailer Menweary. Similar products are listed as Halloween outfits on Amazon, Etsy and other larger retailers.
The Sydney Morning Herald’s parent company, Nine, attributed its publication of the ad to the Google-run distributor, AdSense.
News.com.au’s editor, Kerry Warren, said parent company News Corp was working with the third-party provider to ensure the “error” did not happen again.
A Google spokesperson told The Guardian that it reviewed ads under its policies and allowed publishers to impose further limits if they wished, by blocking specific sources, advertisers, websites or categories.
One could, of course, just take direct ad bookings, rather than programmatic bookings.
Investment in local content has hit the headlines in recent weeks following Nine’s upfront, a story in the News Corp-owned The Australian and on stage at the MFA’s EX conference in Sydney.
“The decisions you make on where to put your ad dollars has an impact on our industry and our country,” Nine CEO Matt Stanton told the crowd at the Nine upfront a couple of weeks ago.
“When you’re next asked how your business is supporting Australian media, there’s a very tactful and easy answer: go all in with Nine and demand real accountability… You’re investing in everything you see here tonight: Australian news, sport and entertainment. When you back Australian media to grow your business, you also make Australia a better place to live, work and do business,” he added.
At MFA EX, panel moderator Mitchell Long asked Omnicom Media CEO Kristiaan Kroon why agencies keep “ploughing” funds into social platforms “despite their negative impact on society”.
“We are custodians of our clients’ money. It is their money. It is not ours. It’s always good to remind ourselves… Why do we spend on social platforms? Because Australians choose to spend a lot of time there,” Kroon replied.
“Whether they are good for the country or not, that becomes a question to have with the marketing department within [a client’s] business. It’s also a question for the government.”
