'How Did We Get To Where We Are Right Now?': Mark Penn Discusses Online 'Censorship'

4 months ago

Mark Penn, founder and CEO of Stagwell, Inc. joins "Forbes Newsroom" to discuss a new major Stagwell survey about news consumption and advertising. Penn spoke about brand safety and censorship.

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Transcript

00:00 So what do you think the message to American publishers and newspapers,

00:05 magazines, publications should be based on this data? I think first this whole

00:11 brand safety thing has been overblown and you see this massively expanding set

00:18 of keywords about things you shouldn't advertise in here. That's got to be shrunk

00:22 you know down considerably and kind of re-evaluated because the social good for

00:28 a brand isn't helping further important news get into consumers. And I think the

00:34 second big message is advertisers look at news. What percentage of your budget

00:40 should really go to news? Probably you're underestimating how much should go to

00:45 news and probably you're undervaluing that and you're not achieving what you

00:50 could with your media buy. So advertisers should be spending more. Concerns about

00:55 brand safety are overblown. How did the concerns about brand safety get

01:00 overblown? How did we get to where we are right now? Well I think that obviously

01:05 the internet itself does produce a lot of controversial content. There are a

01:10 lot of bad things out there but this brand safety seemed to involve almost

01:15 into a censorship type regime where it would really call for

01:23 the demonetization of certain stories and influence. And maybe it was a good

01:27 thing when you're talking about some completely hysterical post that you

01:31 don't want to monetize. But what you really found is it spread to mainstream

01:35 journalism and stories about Biden and Trump or Israel and Hamas. I mean those

01:40 are the kinds of stories we need journalists to be able to have the funds

01:44 to really get to the bottom of. They have to be able to cover wars and

01:48 campaigns really effectively. And so I think that this thing got off track. So

01:55 you want the nation's top advertisers to see this data and perhaps reallocate

02:00 their spend? Yes I think if they run their computer models, evaluate all the

02:05 rates, they'll probably find that they've been over spending on entertainment and

02:12 sports, under spending on news and information, and rebalance their media

02:17 buys and get everybody appropriately funded.

'How Did We Get To Where We Are Right Now?': Mark Penn Discusses Online 'Censorship'

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