NIEMAN LAB – 10/04/2019
Joshua Benton
Today, even the newsiest of news organizations are also lifestyle brands.
The conventional wisdom has long been that advertisers aren’t keen to pitch their wares next to hard news, huge catastrophes, or anything else that could make a target consumer bummed about the state of humanity when they should be contemplating the New! Shaving! Revolution! that Unilever now has the privilege of bringing you. As CNN’s Meredith Artley put it in a speech last year: “In these turbulent times, advertisers might not want to be associated with news that is just bad. You can kinda understand that.”