Brand safety (and other poisoned candy myths)

Whether its razors in apples, broken glass in boiled candy or good old fashion poison in chocolate. To
Americans at least, the Poison Candy myth is all too palpable at Halloween, even to the point that it
resonates with parents all over the world.

The story goes like this; sadistic maniacs bent on causing harm to children place sharp objects,
poison or other unmentionables in Trick-or-treat candy and chocolates in the hope that children will
eat then and suffer the consequences, while the perpetrator hides behind a veneer of gift giving and
his or her anonymity.

Now, this sounds horrifying, and rightly so, however, horror it’s self very rarely begets truth, and
thank God for that.

In a 1985 paper titled 'The Razor Blade in the Apple: The Social Construction of Urban Legends'
sociologist Joel Best and Gerald Horiuchi researched every documented Halloween "incident" since
1958, and the pair could not find a single instance of sadistic stranger sabotaging candy in the hope
of harming children.

In a way reversing hundreds of years of belief and proving that taking candy from strangers might
not be such a bad thing.

This being said, Best and Horiuchi did discover two Halloween deaths related to trick or treat candy.
The first being a 5 year old boy, who based on his parent's testimony died from heroin laced candy.
However, it came to light that the child had discovered his uncle’s heroin stash and overdosed, his
relatives fearing the consequences covered his candy in the drug to deceive police.

The second was an instance of a father poisoning his son with cyanide in order to collect on a newly
minted life insurance policy he had taken out on his child.

In light of this little evidence, a couple of questions remain.

How and why did this fear develop to the behaviour changing idea that it did, and how did it get to
such a point that in the height of its prominence, over 60% of parents worried that their children
could be victimised, warning them only to take packaged candy and also resulted in New Jersey, and
California passing specific laws in relation to candy tampering.

The mystery resided in a handful of social and cognitive biases, general fear and sticky ideas, the
perfect storm for an urban legend.

Once the issues achieved a level of notoriety via media and that viral effect called 'word of mouth', it
primes the scene for a powerful cognitive bias to kick in.

This is known as the Availability Bias; this is the very same bias that causes people to be afraid of
death by sharks even when they are nowhere near water and oblivious to the fact they are
statistically more likely to be killed by a falling washing machine.

This bias - or mental shortcut that our brain uses to save on energy exhausted by actual thinking -
causes us to be more afraid or at least more aware of ideas or concepts that come to mind most
easily.

Basically, you are more likely to believe or be afraid of an idea if you can pull more instances of it to
mind, regardless of factual truth or relevance. This foible is mostly helpful to us, saving time and
effort when shopping, socialising, eating to investing and even in our love lives.
However, when you couple this to an innate fear (we’re biologically hard-wired with a fear of things
like Sharks, snakes and spiders).... well you can see how this effect could lead a large number of
people to behave somewhat irrationally.

Once this happens, this opened the door for the effect to grow into an exponential cycle sometimes
called the Availability Cascade.

This self-reinforcing cycle was brought to collective conscious by Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein in
their 1999 paper "Availability Cascades and Risk Regulation". In this paper, they outline the
mechanism of an availability cascade describing it as a self-reinforcing process hinging collective
belief where "expressed perception can cause a chain reaction that gives the perception of
increasing plausibility through its rising availability in public discourse’.

In the advertising business, creating some kind of availability cascade – a memetic or viral sensation -
is the holy grail. Awards and accolades await the clever agencies who can spark these social
phenomena.

But perhaps we are just as fallible as joe public at being caught up in availability cascades of our
own.

Unless you have had your head in the sand for the last month, you will have witnessed (or
participated in) the mass exodus of brands and advertisers from YouTube, Google and Facebook, in
response to reporting of advertising messages being delivered alongside extremist, sexist, violent
and all around questionable (or ‘un-safe’) content.

This get-the-hell-out-of-dodge approach is rapidly being adopted by advertisers and agencuies across
the board, with ‘Brand safety’ being touted as the primary motivation.

Now it is important to point out that this issue is not new, brand messages popping up alongside
questionable content has been happening since questionable content began.

But the question is why now? There are a few issues fuelling this fire, the main one being that
Facebook and Google have declined to have third-party content verification on their platforms. This
has allowed them to somewhat wash their hands of the whole affair up until now.

However, in the current climate of ramped up political polarisation the stains tend to stick, and
brands are becoming more and more nervous about who and what they may be associated with.
Then inject the fact that Facebook and Google together have unequivocally dominated the world
wide digital ad spend – in effect having advertisers over a barrel – those advertisers are
understandably getting twitchy.

However those same advertisers have now been given an opportunity to claw back a bit of power.

Facebook and Google are slow to respond with solutions.

All this is manna from heaven for ad the industry press who are running story after story of potential
brand damage despite the fact that actual real instances of actual brand damage are at all-time low.

Exit AT&T, Verizon and Johnstons and Johnston state side.

Exit Havas Media in the UK and Exit Telstra, Vodaphone, Nestle, Holden and Kia in Australia.

As the list of media agencies, brands and publishers grow, you can't help but wonder.

Is the candy poisoned or are people running for the hills for no reason?
It was The Times newspaper from the UK that first published the results of an investigation that
‘confirmed’ that brand ads can occasionally pre-roll ISIS videos.

And because those who post this kind of content may theoretically receive a piece of the revenue
generated by the placement of said ads – your favourite brands are unwittingly funding the
nefarious acts of terrorism etc.

For the most part, of course, this is complete nonsense. But The Times craftily evoke the same
innate fears we hold of sharks, or the poisoning of our kids by playing the terrorism card and a full
scale availability cascade starts a-rolling.

Whether this kind of ‘news’ serves the interests of an ‘old’ media owner by have a go at a ‘new’
media owner is for you to decide.

The most notable milestone in the spread of the original candy tampering myths was an article
published in The New York Times in 1970. This article claimed that ‘The Halloween goodies that
children collect this weekend on their rounds of ‘trick or treating’ may bring them more horror than
happiness’.

One suspects that Google et al are going to be big enough and ugly enough to weather this storm, fix
their product and eliminate the relatively minor flaws that have allowed a handful of cases of
unfortunate placement to rattle the hornets’ nest of sensation seeking journos.

This, they will inevitably do.

But what happens to the advertisers who will eventually have to get off the bandwagon and make
peace with our Silcon Valley overlords, and go cap in hand to ask for their adverting space back?

This availability cascade, this digital poisoned candy myth round of brand safety ‘trick or treating’
may end up bring us more horror than happiness.