Scroll, click, repeat: How advertisers can break the cycle of negative content
The proliferation of algorithm-driven content is designed to keep us scrolling, often at the expense of our mental health. In this piece, Georgina Gellert, director of marketing and people strategy at Channel Factory, explores how advertisers can take greater responsibility in supporting content that promotes well-being rather than harm.
In the digital age, doom scrolling has become the modern equivalent of staring into the abyss – only now the abyss is filled with cucumber recipes and TikTok conspiracy theories. We promise ourselves just five more minutes, but suddenly it’s 2am and we’re knee-deep in a rabbit hole about Raygun’s origin story. Who needs sleep when you can have anxiety delivered straight to your fingertips?
But it’s not completely our fault – we know these platforms are designed to keep us scrolling for longer and longer. And unfortunately, a large part of how these platforms keep us engaged is by showing us negative, divisive and sometimes just downright toxic content. It’s an unfortunate reality that in the algorithm-defined platforms we all spend way more time on than we can even admit, contentious content gets engagement.
We all feed the algorithm. But the difference is, working in media means it’s harder for me to deny that we are far more responsible than we think for the mental health of our audiences.
Reading the results of the recently published Mentally Healthy research made this even clearer. This much-needed survey revealed we still have a lot of work to do to support the mental health of professionals in our industry. It particularly called out the presence of burnout, anxiety and stress from work.
The thing is, we all know this, have discussed it to death, and by and large try to mitigate it in the workplace.
But there’s a disconnect between recognising the importance of mental health as professionals and putting our consumer hat on and understanding how we may, often inadvertently, encourage the promotion of harmful content online via the support of our advertising.
Many advertisers are looking for cheap reach, which is what many platforms offer, but the real cost of that click on society at large can often be buried. Gone are the days when people will turn a blind eye to the environment in which your messaging appears.
Our research has shown that more than a third of Australians feel that brands support the content their ads are adjacent to (36%). No matter how much thought has gone into ensuring an ad campaign is ticking all the boxes when it comes to relevance, diversity and representation, they can unfortunately still end up being damaging by being displayed next to content that is negative or perpetuating anxiety, stress or depression.
It’s not just damaging for mental health either. Running ads next to content misaligned with your brand’s value or voice, even if it’s not necessarily unsafe, can seriously diminish effectiveness.
Of course, there are certainly grey areas when it comes to this phenomenon. We know that what affects one person may not affect another – and what’s right for one brand may not be right for another.
This ‘grey’ content may not be completely unsafe or unsuitable for advertising, but if the content next to your ad looks even slightly incongruous, it can have a serious impact on advertising metrics – the same research we referenced earlier shows that ads displayed next to questionable content diminishes brand recall and intent metrics.
So ads helping support negative content isn’t just harming customers, but also your brand.
While we can accept that there’s a certain degree of control we give up when algorithms become involved, that turns the responsibility back onto the brand. There must be pressure and incentive to think more deeply about how we can all be more proactive about gaining clarity over where our ads are appearing.
Ad environments that fall into grey areas require careful judgement calls be made by brands and their agencies. There isn’t always a one-size fits all solution as misaligned content for one brand could be a smart, under-leveraged opportunity for another.
There needs to be intentionality behind choosing to support positive or uplifting content. It shouldn’t be something that “may” happen if the algorithm decides it, but rather something that should be a goal of any media strategy.
If you reverse engineer the motivations here, you can understand how advertisers can be hugely effective in creating change here. Ultimately these platforms are there to generate engagement, which in turn creates ad dollars.
If the advertiser funding disappears from the negative content being served to users, platforms will be incentivised to work harder to get engagement against the positive content – in turn affecting what pops up in all our feeds.
I’m in, I hear you cry, but how can we do it, Georgina?
An example of the campaign on Instagram
You may be thinking about tools like block lists which have often been relied on to help protect brands from appearing alongside certain content. But these can be a double edged sword as they tend to be too restrictive. Block lists often inadvertently stop ads displaying against harmless content to potential customers, often quietly marginalising certain groups of people accidentally.
Instead, brands should lean on inclusion lists that carefully consider the keywords, sites, topics and other contextual modifiers they want to target to ensure that ads only appear in media where it is contextually relevant and appropriate for the brand.
But to make sure nothing slips through, brands need to audit all content across digital platforms and analyse audience demographics, behaviours and interests that can negatively affect impressions, whilst keeping an eye on any industry-level changes that may affect these audiences.
It may seem like a lot of work, but in the efforts of preserving both your own and your audience’s mental health, I believe it’s work that has to be done.
While we can’t control every algorithm, we can control the choices we make as advertisers and impact what programming decisions go into them. By supporting positive content, we not only break the doom scrolling cycle for ourselves, but also contribute to a healthier online experience for everyone.
Georgina Gellert is the director of marketing and people strategy at Channel Factory.
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