Comment by zbentley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zbentley | Hacker News Reader

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> Advertising: perhaps the best and most effective involuntary ally of the Puritan movement.

The usual defense by advertisers is that their clients do not want their businesses to be associated with adult material, so they insist that advertisers do not place ads on adult-content-friendly websites to reduce the risk of that association happening due to ads adjacent to adult content.

I'm curious as to how valid that is. Are many/most businesses (or many/most businesses that are highly valuable to advertisers) materially concerned enough about association-with-adult-content-via-ad-placement that they would switch advertisers over it? Or are advertisers manufacturing family-friendly ad placement as a competitive selling point that their customers never really asked for?

I'm also curious about the next level down the stack, as it were: if a significant subset of businesses who hire advertisers are concerned about adult-content-association-via-nearby-placement, why is that? Is it merely disgust/discomfort on the part of business leadership and prevailing culture? Or does data indicate that there's a material risk to enough businesses' bottom lines that it's fiscally prudent to avoid that association?

(Reasoning from first principles without data, so probably wrong) I'm skeptical about the validity of both claims. Adult content is really popular across many demographics whose behavior is otherwise quite different. Given that broad base of popularity, is it really that risky for a business to have its brand appear in an ad next to pornography compared to, say, appearing on a politically extreme news site, or next to algorithmically-prioritized ragebait content on social media? Unlike adult content, I feel like the associations formed by seeing a company mentioned next to something anger inducing are more likely to be negative than the associations formed by seeing it next to adult content that the viewer presumably sought out. In both cases, the chance of behaviorally-significant associations being formed at all seems quite low, so I'd imagine that effects here (if there are any) would only be visible in the very very large.

https://hbr.org/2024/03/lessons-from-the-bud-light-boycott-o...

Advertisers don’t have to believe the content is actually objectionable to fear reprisal. Outrage machine types on all sides will make an issue out of anything they can use to score points for themselves.

The marginal value of putting a Johnson & Johnson ad (say) in front of some furries is nothing compared to dread of the headline “J&J wants your children to be furries!”

> putting a Johnson & Johnson ad (say) in front of some furries

A very real possibility when advertising on DeviantArt. But a no-adult-content policy would have (probably) satisfied adsense terms but would not have eliminated (most) of the furrie content on DeviantArt.

This.

The advertisers care about getting bad press and having to do the rounds in the "news cycle".

By now everyone knows that advertisers don't choose which posts, tweets, images, etc. their ads are shown next to, but that still won't stop the CNNs of the world from writing a "<Brand> advertises next to Nazi content on <Platform>!" article.

While many media outfits are very good at manufacturing outrage, I’m not sure whether a big ad farm putting (say) Walmart ads on PornHub would materially move the needle on bad-press-risk.

Like, if a media outlet or politico wants to make hay about Walmart being advertised next to nazis, I’m sure that’s trivially easy to find today (and you only need to find one instance of that adjacency to make hay for a news cycle).

So why isn’t this already an issue in the status quo? Why aren’t brands being pressured into changing their ad placement habits right and left?

Sure, some businesses are being called out for things they explicitly endorse (e.g. Budweiser pride ads), but that’s not the same thing as running an ordinary ad in a questionable place.

Perhaps advertisers have written off adult content sites as places where there isn’t enough money to be made to risk it? If so, I’m curious what consumer behavioral data backs up that conclusion.

>So why isn’t this already an issue in the status quo?

Didn’t this just happen to Xhitter? Their ad revenue has dropped like a brick.

> The usual defense by advertisers is that their clients do not want their businesses to be associated with adult material

That's the biggest joke in the world, the largest diffusers of explicit content are by far the advertisers which they use to sell anything, from cars to shampoo

The advertising industry is the very last industry which can claim a moral high ground on anything.

Reread what you quoted. The advertising industry isn't claiming the moral high ground on anything, they claim their client are. And their clients will tell you, no, it's the customers who will throw a fit at the slightest hint of nipple.

It's buck-passing all the way down.

> the largest diffusers of explicit content are by far the advertisers which they use to sell anything, from cars to shampoo

Relevant Bill Hicks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4NyMJHWVHw

They lie outright. The other day I saw an ad of a body lotion that “modifies your skin DNA”, according to the ad.

> I'm curious as to how valid that is. Are many/most businesses (or many/most businesses that are highly valuable to advertisers) materially concerned enough about association-with-adult-content-via-ad-placement that they would switch advertisers over it? Or are advertisers manufacturing family-friendly ad placement as a competitive selling point that their customers never really asked for?

I've worked in a couple of digital advertising roles (mea culpa) and brand safety is a very big deal. No-one wants their product associated with porn, extremism, or even politics. eXtwitter's revenue implosion due to advertisers pulling out (pun not entirely intended) is one recent example of the importance placed on brand safety.

That's what I'm curious about. Are advertisers insisting that brand safety is hyper-important and businesses are going along (or starting to believe it after enough repetition)? Or are businesses independently bringing that constraint to advertisers? If the latter, why do businesses believe that--is it based in evidence of bottom-line risk to the business (customers will leave in proportion to brand-safety-compromising ad misplacement), or is it a more subjective combination of risk aversion and distaste for brand-unsafe content?

People who hate nudity will organise protests and get news coverage, giving more voice to a minority. Same with anything, the ones massively for/against something will spend money time/money on complaining that the passive majority. See gun control in US for an example

It ultimately all happens due to news media. While there are many journalists who work hard to earn the high status that was accorded to the profession in the past, the news industry as it stands today, by and large, exists mostly to foment outrage and spread strife.

If the media stopped writing shrieking news articles about "X brand promoting Y evil", we could all move on collectively as a society.

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