We’ve all been there: you’re blissfully streaming a TV show, not a care in the world. Then, a commercial cuts in at approximately the same decibel as a banshee’s shriek, forcing you to cover your ears or lunge for the remote.

You’re being too loud: It’s a common complaint that viewers have lodged against just about every ad-supported platform, including Hulu, Roku, and Paramount+. Some TV manufacturers, like Sony, have even published explainers on their websites explaining that it’s not their fault that ads are sometimes unbearably loud.

Unfortunately, though, there’s not exactly an easy fix. Loud ads have plagued the television industry for years—and the rise of more ad-supported tiers means that there may be even more obnoxious volume-shifts in your viewing future.

An old, loud problem

The reasoning for loud ads is simple: advertisers realized if they cranked the volume of their messages, they’d get noticed one way or another.

“TV advertisers have always known that ad breaks are when people go to the bathroom, to the kitchen, or are likely to move around,” explained Dave Morgan, CEO and founder of TV advertising platform Simulmedia. “Being able to make sure that your audio pops is a way to make sure that you’re memorable.”

But being memorable can also mean being annoying, and there have been efforts to regulate those annoyances away:

• In 2012, the Federal Communications Commission implemented the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act, which requires ads on broadcast and cable TV to have the same average volume as the programs they run alongside.
• Viewers who notice egregiously loud commercials are encouraged to report violations to the FCC, which says it will then investigate noncompliance and could exact financial penalties.
• The CALM Act requires broadcasters to adopt the A/85 Recommended Practice, authored by the Advanced Television Systems Committee, a nonprofit that recommends technical specifications for TV programming and ads.

In theory, broadcasters and pay-TV providers are to regulate the volume of ads that play on their stations, and the technical set-up of traditional TV allows for oversight and enforcement at the TV-company level, Morgan explained.

“Every ad is received in the station, or the cable company, or the programmer, or the broadcast company, where it’s reviewed [and] it’s transcoded,” Morgan told Marketing Brew. “If the sound’s too high, they’ll literally say, ‘Hey, we’re taking the volume down.’”

In practice, though, loud ads have not been snuffed out. Keep reading here.—KS

Someone get the Tums—advertisers were (and still are) funding many of the publishers fomenting “Stop the Steal,” according to a new report from NewsGuard, a company that works with advertisers and media agencies to vet publishers.

Advertisers including AT&T, Kia, Honda, Mastercard, Kohl’s, Pottery Barn, Logitech, and Blue Cross Blue Shield have run programmatic advertisements on sites like the Federalist or ZeroHedge that have published content like “Yes, Biden Is Hiding His Plan to Rig The 2022 Midterm Elections,” NewsGuard found.

• So did government entities like the CDC, the Department of Veteran Affairs, and HealthCare.gov.
• When Marketing Brew went to look at that specific article, we saw display advertising from Amazon and Pottery Barn.
• Other publishers shared with Marketing Brew include One American News Network and lesser-known sites like 100%fedup.com and greatgameindia.com.

In total, NewsGuard reported that in the past year, some 1,975 brands have advertised across 166 publishers that it flagged for “publishing falsehoods and conspiracy theories about the election,” something that it began tracking during the 2020 presidential election.

How? These ads were served programmatically, meaning they are often targeted to a specific user or audience and largely agnostic to the publisher they’re running on. Some ways that advertisers can try to combat this is by using blocklists (which is how NewsGuard makes money) or by working with an adtech company like DoubleVerify, which claims it can block keywords advertisers might want to avoid, like “election fraud.”

Despite these efforts, advertisers are still, often inadvertently, funding these publishers.

“Many brands may think that because this is a problem that is across the industry, that they’re not going to be held specifically accountable. I think public opinion is way ahead of brands in this regard,” Gordon Crovitz, co-founder of NewsGuard, told Marketing Brew.

+1: Last August, we reported on a similar NewsGuard report that found that advertisers were spending billions on misinformation sites, accounting for roughly 1.68% of all display ad spend.—RB

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