It's far less reasonable for governments to use their authority to intervene between those parties, at least without clear legal justification and prior exercise of due process.
It's reasonable for them to care, but it's less reasonable that anyone else care about their concerns.
Advertisers are the clients, but they also need something to attract our eyeballs before they can hijack our attention with their shitty ads. Media is a lot more consolidated than the ad industry and they have a strong enough position to push back. All media has to say is "if you pull your ads we'll never run another ad for your product in any of our magazines/broadcasts/websites again"
There's zero reason why anyone should assume that just because an ad is shown in a magazine it indicates total approval of the full contents of that magazine anyway.
The incentive structures are clear: you do nothing and maybe get fired if your company gets embroiled in a controversy due to the placement of those ads, or you pull your ads and spend that budget in another channel, and worse case nothing will happen to you, and best case you'll be praised for proactive thinking. Woke or not, I'd imagine most people would choose the latter; the former is mostly downside with limited upside.
Of course you don't. You're watching things you're comfortable with and so you have no complaint about an advertiser's association with it.
> I'm pretty sure this is also true for 99.9% of other people. This brand safety stuff is just an excuse for woke marketing staffers to feel like they're "making a difference" by attacking people and companies they don't like.
Holding advertisers accountable for their placement, and distributors accountable for their catalog, predates "woke culture" by well over a century. Most "woke culture" activists in the US grew up seeing it aggressively deployed by "family oriented" activist groups in 1970's - 2000's era and they saw it be extremely effective at influencing what was available on TV, in print, in cinemas, and on music shelves because it threatened revenue and scared capitalists. And those "family groups" learned it from the anti-communists of the post-WWII era, etc, etc.
It's not new, it's not "woke", and history suggests that it does have material impact on media, culture, and business.
I'd say that advertisers are in a good place to know whether people do or don't notice what ads are next to content, or vice versa.
I do notice ads and assume some minimal endorsement of content by the advertisers - we are constantly assured that Internet ads are at least demographically targeted.