In this guest byline, Stephanie Himoff, Chief Commercial Supply Officer at adtech platform Teads, examines how the rise of AI-generated content is reshaping the digital landscape, and why the rise of ‘AI slop’ – low-quality AI-generated content – could cause brands to turn to premium, trusted publishing environments to cut through the noise.
With a speed never seen before, the world of branding and advertising is being overturned by AI. It’s making the ‘dotcom’ boom (for those around long enough to remember it) look small fry. This is more revolution than boom. While companies and agencies are responding to the internal and operational impact of AI, there is an equally significant AI-related change to grapple with – that of the AI slop fundamentally changing the internet for all users.
The slop in question is the AI-generated content that is deluging the internet. Across social media platforms fake images, posts from people who don’t exist, fabricated videos, and myriad false content is filling people’s feeds. It ranges from the disturbing to the ludicrous, from deliberate disinformation to playful creation – but at a scale that means everyone’s experience of the digital world is changing detrimentally.
Research found that up to a third of YouTube’s feed may consist of AI slop as low-quality, brain rot videos surge. But the impact varies considerably depending on channel and country.
As users’ digital experience deteriorates – and more content is met with a sceptical eye at best or avoided entirely at worse – the dilemma for brands wanting to cut through the slop saturation is how to ensure their genuine content remains trusted and seen.
Havens of Quality
It’s all about the company that the advertising keeps. To be trusted, ads need to be in brand safe environments – and this means the content is on premium sites. Quality publications become safe havens for people wanting to avoid slop and get quickly to information – be that articles or videos – that they know is trustworthy, verified and authentic.
We know from research that advertising on quality, trusted sites performs better – no matter what the topic it appears adjacent to. Premium digital news environments offer brand safety and attention metrics that few other sites can match.
Indeed, Stagwell’s Future of Media report with research from HarrisX proved that brands benefit from these environments even when their ads appear next to political stories – often considered too polarising by advertisers. A further, recent wave of research in Germany, found it was safe for brands to advertise adjacent to quality news content agnostic of the topic. The reputation of quality news sites draws in readers, and we expect this to continue to be an influence and factor in how people look for news on the internet as they seek to avoid AI slop.
When advertisers carefully select the sites, they can enjoy the reflected glory of quality and trustworthiness from the content they pay to be on. The benefit goes beyond trust and reputation to positively impacting advertisers’ profits according to research. It found that advertisers using news brands experienced an 88% uplift in profits in 2018-2022 compared with non-users of news brands.
As the slop grows, so too does the backlash. Comments pointing out AI content often get more traction than the original post. But the nature of the algorithm means all comments and attention – whether positive or negative – feed the machine.
Brands with a genuine interest in the protection and integrity of quality information on the internet need to show their support for the platforms promoting this. When brands avoid advertising around the news, they unintentionally add to the weakening of journalism and public trust. Advertising alongside quality news supports independent reporting, reaches highly engaged audiences, and delivers strong brand outcomes.
Financial support in the form of advertising is needed more than ever. Beyond the slop flooding feeds, AI is jeopardising the fiscal foundations of publishing. This week, at the WAN-IFRA World News Media Congress in Marseille, New York Times chairman and publisher AG Sulzberger warned of the oncoming ‘tsunami’ from AI giants and called on the industry to do more to stand up to the “brazen theft” of intellectual property by AI.
Among the ways the industry can fight back, he called for more original reporting saying that to be a destination in an AI-intermediated world, journalism will need to be “so distinctive it has its own gravity”. He said the New York Times has already spent more than $20m on lawsuits against OpenAI/Microsoft and Perplexity. We’ve already seen the introduction of the SPUR Media Alliance, a coalition of five major UK media outlets designed to address how AI companies access and use publishers’ content and improve transparency. It’s crucial we see more initiatives driving this goal forward.
The future of media is publisher-powered. In a world flooded with synthetic content, trusted journalism gives brands credibility, attention and strong brand outcomes. And for that trusted environment to continue to exist, brands must play their part.
