Reach operates a number of high profile international, national, regional and local digital properties. We aim to be an essential part of people’s daily lives by delivering content and services that inform, enlighten and enrich.

As part of that vision we cover events and themes, good and bad, in the wider world and closer to people’s homes.  As such our content, both created and curated from sources, can sometimes cover difficult and challenging topics.

At Reach, to deliver on our mission of informing and enlightening, we believe that some news and events, however challenging, shocking or distasteful, should be shared and communicated to our audiences albeit within a professionally controlled and edited manner.

As a leading UK publisher, we are bound by the terms of the Editors’ Code of Practice as administered by the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO). We are governed by the law of England and Wales, including on areas such as libel, obscenity and other legal constraints. All editorial staff have completed legal training as part of their journalism training and then undergo on-going training in their careers with us.

To fulfil our mission in the digital sphere, we, for the most part, rely on advertising to preserve our belief in the free access to news and our users suggest they prefer that value exchange.We recognise that issues around ad placement may involve a large degree of subjectivity.We recognise that certain forms of online advertising, e.g. pre roll audio visual, are perceived to have more stand out and closer affinity to the content that follows than other forms of advertising including standard display, television news, newspapers and radio.

Given this subjectivity, the stand out of online advertising and the coverage of challenging topics by Reach, we can never guarantee that adverts, display or audio visual, may be thought or considered by individuals or organisations to be inappropriate.

However, we are sensitive to brand requirements and want to minimise the risk of controversial advertising placement and work hard to avoid ad issues.We operate on a combination of human plus machine led protection.

We can exclude advertisers from running against certain sections of our sites such as News to minimise the chances of appearing alongside difficult topics. If you wish to take this up please discuss this with your sales representative prior to booking.

Editorial content blocking:

Our editors categorise and flag sensitive AV content within our CMS which disables ad delivery before the video is published on our sites.

Category 1. Unsafe AV content with ALL ads disabled because

• Content contains clearly visible signs of death or fatal injury.
• Content could be considered as promotional material for criminal or terrorist organisations such as ISIS.
• Content contains footage or audio that could incite criminal or racist activity.
• Content contains footage of explicit sexual acts.

As with display, in addition to the above, videos on terrorism related themes will carry no advertising for a minimum of 12hrs.

Category 2. ‘Distressing’ content that is flagged and will not run across Premium Deals

Video which includes distressing events that can be emotionally sensitive. Trained journalist will judge whether this content would offend readers if an ad ran in front of, or is content, which premium advertisers would not wish to be in front of.

Semantic Technology:

As with display advertising, we offer ad hoc brand environments for advertisers via contextual blacklisting and whitelisting. See above.

Again using semantic targeting technology we also offer exclusions for advertisers who may not wish to be seen against certain content and/or specific channels. However, advertisers need to be specific on their requirements and technology can never be perfect nor can it cater for judgement calls. If you wish to take this up please discuss this with your sales representative prior to booking.

If you have concerns about the placement of advertising, please contact your sales representative or point of contact as soon as possible. On receipt of the details, we will aim to resolve the issue within 2 working hours (Monday to Friday – 9am to 5.30pm) for managed campaigns only.

We have a response plan in place for major incidents, e.g. terrorism: as soon as the incident is declared a terrorist attack by News Publishers we block all ads from all Homepages, News Homepages and all relevant articles within 2 working hours (Monday to Friday – 9am to 5.30pm).

Every issue and its consequences will be reviewed on a case by case scenario.