When tensions rise, leaders don’t panic – they find ways to manage uncertainty. Sofoklis Ioannou, Chief Revenue Officer at Tailwind EMEA, the regional partner of Integral Ad Science (IAS), speaks to Campaign Middle East on why contextual empathy is the winning formula during uncertainty, and how categories such as travel and tourism can stay visible without putting their brand at risk.
We’re operating in a period of regional uncertainty. What’s the right advertising approach for brands today?
The instinct to pause advertising in uncertain times is understandable. But it’s a decision driven by fear, not strategy. Just like people, brands are asked to adapt to the volatile environment around them, be present, and signal continuity to the people.
The real risk isn’t the environment or market dynamics. It is operating blind.
Is our advertising strategy aligned with how people actually feel right now?
That’s the question every CMO should be putting to their team. Not as a formality, but as a genuine test. Because if the honest answer is “we don’t know” that’s the problem. Not the economic climate, not the media landscape, not the competitors. The absence of that answer is the strategic gap that matters most.
A sharp increase in ads that land out of context or are tone deaf, are symptoms of brand talking to a world that has now changed. The root cause is almost always a team that hasn’t stopped to ask whether their strategy reflects the moment their customers are actually living in.
Solve that first. Everything else follows.
What does it look like in practice for a brand to move away from the “on/off” logic?
It starts with a fundamental shift in how brands think about presence. The on/off model treats advertising as a tap, something you turn up when confidence is high and cut when it isn’t. But audiences don’t disappear when you do. They just stop hearing from you.
The more powerful mental model is: always relevant, always adapting. Not running the same campaign regardless of context, but staying in the conversation while being intelligent about how you show up.
When tension escalates, the instinct is to pull everything. But a blanket pause is a blunt instrument. The brands that navigate it better make sharper differentiated decisions per each audience segment. Adjusting tone, excluding placements where their message would land badly, reviewing creative for anything that jars against the moment. They stay in the room. They just change how they speak.
Because what consistent presence actually offers is continuity. A quiet signal to audiences that life is still moving forward, that there are still things worth planning for, routines worth keeping. In moments of uncertainty, that’s not a commercial message. It’s a human one. And it’s the brands who showed up that people remember when the tension lifts.
How does modern advertising technology help here?
There is an important misconception to clear up. Brand safety is not about hiding behind a wall of keywords. It is about shaping the right environment for your message to appear in, and that changes depending on the moment you are in.
The teams that get this right are asking two questions:
- Are we monitoring context suitability shifts in real time?
- Have we updated our sensitivity thresholds to protect us from the spike in negative content?
What catches most brands off guard is where the real risk lives. The brand safety conversation has long centered on programmatic keyword blocklists, exclusion lists, open web inventory. But during periods of conflict or crisis, walled gardens become some of the most volatile environments a brand can appear in. Social platforms flood with unverified content and emotionally charged commentary faster than any blocklist can respond. The danger isn’t just a bad article. It’s the delicate, unpredictable context of a feed where your message can sit between a breaking news alert and a grief post without warning.
A keyword won’t catch that. Only a coherent, cross-channel safety playbook will.
Are there industries where this conversation becomes especially urgent?
Travel and tourism is one of the clearest cases. Consumer mindset shifts overnight when tensions rise. Search behavior changes, bookings drop, and the news environment around destinations can move from inspirational to sensitive in minutes.
The instinct is to pause every campaign, but pausing removes you from consideration sets that take months or years to rebuild. Travel demand doesn’t completely disappear during times of tension, it redistributes. Brands that stay present, with empathy and the right contextual signals, are the ones consumers turn to first when confidence returns.
This is why we built a practical playbook for advertisers operating through tension, a brand safety working document marketers can use. It covers the CMO decision lens for managing brand exposure, how real-time sentiment and brand suitability keep brands safe across channels, and a phased approach that turns reactivity into an operating model for staying relevant under pressure.
What’s the core message to marketers right now?
The most enduring brands in any market are the ones people associate not just with a product, but with a period in their lives. The ones that were there, that kept things moving.
That didn’t disappear when the moment got hard. The opportunity for every marketer right now is not to protect share of voice, but to be part of what holds a community together when it needs it most.
In volatile times, contextual empathy is a leadership signal.
The Tailwind EMEA Playbook: Advertising in Times of Tension is available to download here.
