The Washington Post is challenging the industry to put facts over fear about advertising in news and creating a new way for advertisers to safely increase their reach to high value audiences in quality news environments. Advertisers have nothing to fear from news content, only something to gain. 

The ambition of brand safety and suitability is to ensure advertising dollars are spent in quality, well-lit, fraud-free environments. But the core mechanisms advertisers have access to — the tech and the approach — hit news like a sledgehammer and hurt the performance of advertisers’ campaigns. 

These articles were flagged for:

It is brand suitability AI built for the nuance of news:

1. Beacon Guard scans every article and categorizes them looking for risk topics.
2. It then differentiates between safe content, explanatory content, breaking news, opinions, and unsafe content.
3. Finally, based on risk levels (high, medium, low, safe) it makes a content-level decision to serve an ad or not.

Using this capability our beta partners have unlocked15-25% more reach to our highest value audiences placing ads in contexts that align with and enhance brand values.

Every advertiser who works with The Washington Post has access to this brand suitability technology via Convergence with customizations that account for custom blocklists and specific requests.

Convergence is a suite of  privacy-compliant tools designed to help our clients:

• Gain a comprehensive understanding of their Washington Post audiences 
• Precisely target that audience
• Accurately measure at and beyond the click
• Seamlessly collaborate data

Advertising partners leveraging Convergence capabilities can see 5.7x increase in performance metrics, including CTR.

---