TLDR
A ThinkNewsBrands audit of 1,200 Australian news articles found 57% contained terms capable of triggering ad exclusion rules, with 38% of safe articles wrongly blocked. Misapplied keyword block lists put $180 million in annual ad spend and 23 million audience interactions at risk.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The audit and what it found
ThinkNewsBrands analysed 1,200 news articles from ten major Australian publishers across July 2025 to June 2026, finding that 57% contained at least one term capable of triggering a keyword exclusion rule.[1] The report, titled Beyond Brand Safety: The Trust Advantage, was released on World News Day, 27 September 2026.
Brand safety tools wrongly excluded 38% of the articles rated lower sensitivity, stories that posed no real risk to an advertiser.[1] ThinkNewsBrands estimates the misfires cost $180 million a year in advertising and 23 million potential audience interactions.[1]
ThinkNewsBrands chief executive Vanessa Lyons said the evidence exposes outdated keyword block lists as a wolf in sheep's clothing, shrinking the very audiences those brands are paying to reach.[1]
The word 'Victoria' and how blocking actually works
Keyword block lists are sets of terms that programmatic buyers load into their demand-side platform (DSP), software used to purchase digital advertising automatically. When a bid request arrives carrying page metadata that matches any excluded keyword, the ad is filtered out before the auction runs.
The most-blocked word across the 1,200 articles was "Victoria".[1] Business and finance coverage and sport had the most wrongful exclusions, and both are among the most valuable environments Australian publishers sell.[1]
Google's Display and Video 360 (DV360), one of the dominant DSPs in the Australian market, allows advertisers to apply up to four negative keyword lists of 5,000 terms each at the account level.[2] Account-level exclusions apply a blanket block across every campaign the advertiser runs. A list written during one crisis and never reviewed keeps blocking pages for every campaign on that account.
The guidance was there in 2020
The IAB Tech Lab, the international programmatic standards body, issued direct guidance on exactly this problem in July 2020. Its News Media List Guidance told buyers to "list the sites and avoid blind keyword blocking due to 'Covid' or other future crisis related keywords."[3] The recommendation was to identify credible publishers explicitly and buy from them directly.
The ThinkNewsBrands figures suggest many buyers still block on keywords six years later. Brand safety tools are built to identify contexts where ads should not appear, covering genuinely harmful or toxic content,[4] but when lists expand to capture every term that ever appeared in a crisis article, coverage drifts well beyond that original intent.
The fixes buyers are usually pointed to are regular audits of exclusion lists, contextual tools that assess the whole article rather than single words, and direct deals with trusted publishers.
SOURCES & CITATIONS
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What is a keyword block list in programmatic advertising?
Why does $180 million in ad spend appear to be at risk?
Why was 'Victoria' the most-blocked word in the audit?
Xaviery Malinao writes for Prompt the Market on how brands and agencies are adapting to answer engines, drawing on Bushnote's work with clients across search, AI search and content.
