Almost half (45%) of Euro 2024 coverage was blocked from receiving advertising, having been wrongfully classified as “not brand safe.”
Mantis, our market-leading brand-safety and contextual ad solution, identified this issue. Mantis found that brands opting to keyword-block terms like “shot”, “shoot”, “shoot-out” and “attack” — likely to avoid having ads placed against news reports of violent conflicts — missed out on advertising against Euro football matches and negatively impacted publisher revenues.
It similarly found that 56% of articles published around England’s semi-final match against the Netherlands were also blocked by advertisers using such keywords, amounting to 174 brands blocking those pages from advertising.
Bukayo Saka (left) and Harry Kane during the Euro 2024 final
“It is worryingly common when brands rely on a blanket blocklist of keywords in the attempt to deliver brand-safe advertising,” Mantis Managing Director, Fiona Salmon, told The Media Leader.
“While there is a need for brands to actively avoid association with potentially controversial or damaging articles, the keyword blocklist approach frequently results in inventory that is contextually relevant, and safe, being blocked. This not only negatively impacts publisher revenue, but also reduces brand exposure to target audiences reading suitable and safe content.”
Salmon called the issue of keyword-blocking “particularly prevalent” with sports reporting because of the common overlap of language used in sport and in more controversial stories.
Other keywords commonly blocked in relation to sport coverage include “crashed” and “crashing”, in reference to a team exiting a tournament; “attack”, “attacker” and “attacking”; “disastrous” as in a poor performance; and “steal” as in stealing the ball or stealing the show.
