Adtech Tries to Solve A Major Problem: Brand Safety

Since 2017, there have been several high profile bad ad placements by major publishers — including YouTube, Facebook and GoogleOpens a new window — that have thrust brand safety to the marketing forefront. 

After all, it’s most marketers worst nightmare to discover that their ads are being placed next to video content produced and passed around by pedophiles or extremists, as was the case with YouTube’s brand safety controversy last yearOpens a new window .

Defined in a report commissioned by the Trustworthy Accountability Group as “the controls that companies in the digital advertising supply chain employ to protect brands against negative impacts to the brand’s consumer reputation,” brand safety has understandably been top of mind for many digital marketers.

Indeed, for a couple years major brands and advertisers have been prioritizing the need to find ways to safeguard their brand imageOpens a new window and ensure their ads are protected against bad brand associations.

For many companies, the best insurance policy to avoid such ad spot scares has been to develop their own brand safety blacklists, known commonly as “blocklists.” It’s a black-and-white process that traditionally operates under a ‘better safe than sorry’ maxim.

And while this approach generally works, it’s restrictive by nature, especially considering the lack of standardized brand safety controls in the digital marketing environment.

Brand safety-related technology, though, has come a long way, says Mark Ashworth, international vice-president and general manager at Oracle Data Cloud. The tools that many companies use to avoid and prevent negative brand associations have “become increasingly sophisticated and nuanced,” says Ashworth, “so much so that the premise behind brand-safety blacklists will become obsolete.”

The role of politics

The current volatile political landscape — especially in the US — has been a key driver of the development of brand safety-related technologies.

The upcoming, contentious 2020 US presidential election, for example, has many news publishersOpens a new window frantically looking to devise more advanced brand safety standards.

The American Association of Advertising Agencies and Digital Content Next, US trade bodies that represent media agencies and publishers, are developing standardized sentiment analysis benchmarks that can be applied to recognized news websites so that advertisers can be sure their campaigns don’t show up next to controversial political content.

Similarly, Facebook has introduced a slate of new brand safety measuresOpens a new window intended to give advertisers more control over their ad spots. Rather than a blacklist, Facebook is testing a new function that give advertisers the ability to white-list publishers and content categories they trust.

Facebook’s decision to offer more control to its advertising clients follows continuing criticism of the social media company’s political ads policy, which, as Megan Graham writes for CNBCOpens a new window , allows for content that spreads “lies and misinformation” and “lets advertisers target those messages.”

The social media giant is clearly trying to appease the many companies, particularly those with family-friendly brand images to protect, that have been careful not to invest in all of Facebook’s ad products due to worries that their campaigns could end up next to controversial, hot-button, politically-skewed content.

Mergers and acquisitions

As tends to happen with most fast-growing marketing segments, the industry-wide focus on brand safety has led to mergers, acquisitions and investments in the space.

To name a few:

• Ad measurement firm Integral Ad Science recently acquired European adtech firm AdmantX SpA in a move meant to help the US company provide advertising clients with a more holistic view of the articles on which their ads are run, analyzing both content and context.
• IAS competitor DoubleVerify Inc. made a similar purchase, buying web content classifying experts Leiki.
• Nielsen Holdings PLC also followed this trend, taking a minority stake in OpenSlate, a company that specializes in categorizing YouTube and Facebook videos so that advertisers have an easier time finding suitable content for their ads.

Ultimately, nearly every brand safety-related development is trying to answer the principle brand safety question: How can brands get control over their ad placements?

From safety to sustainability

As publishers, advertisers and tech developers work together to develop next gen brand safety solutions, many experts predict a shift to brand ‘sustainability.’

In many ways, brand sustainability aligns with Facebook’s shift to white-listing.

As Ashworth explains, this new focus “goes well beyond simple blocking to include the ability to identify and target premium inventory. Brand suitability will mean advertisers get access to more premium inventory, and more control of their adspend, while publishers will benefit from increases in scale and a more complete match of their high-value environments to advertisers.”

It’s a win-win.