Nearly 90% of consumers believe that ensuring ads don’t appear next to unsuitable content is a “brand responsibility.”
Brands create their identity in the market and in the minds of the customers through their marketing and advertising efforts. However, their brand identities are put at stake whenever their digital assets appear next to unsavory content.
The rise of unsafe digital environments, ad fraud, and evolving methods of cybercrime constantly fuel this relentlessly growing fire, always keeping the brands on their toes.
The need to define parameters for safeguarding the personality, i.e., incorporating brand suitability, has become paramount.
Brand suitability is an extension of brand safety, as it avoids serving ads next to bad content. Deciding the relevant ad placements offers many advantages to the brand, e.g., better engagements, revenue, affiliate associations, etc. According to the IAB report, new brands have witnessed a 44% increase in ad engagement due to ad relevancy with the content.
Incorporating brand suitability certainly helps to enhance user experience, ROAS (Return on Advertising Spends), and drive positive associations with customers, reputable affiliates, and potential investors. The following steps can help your organization to set brand suitability standards:
3 Steps to Set Your Brand Suitability Standards
Step 1: Create a Whitelist
Selecting the content suitable for the ad placements requires figuring out the most suitable domains/URLs. At this point, many brands don’t want to appear next to Ukraine war news, as it could drive unwanted traffic, deplete the advertising budget quicker than their estimated time and deliver results lower than expectations.
Making a content/context whitelist is one way of dealing with unwanted traffic on your ads. Brand suitability also includes defining the best context/content placements for boosting the ad relevancy, engagement with the customer, targeting the correct audience, etc. The affirmation of knowing that the ad is appearing in suitable environments and has high relevancy offers relief.
But recently, we also uncovered that websites are often miscategorized. For example, Vogue is considered an adult website. Creating content/context whitelists for the ads is challenging, and comes with a few drawbacks, such as limited reach, but it can definitely increase the ad relevancy and prevent unsavory content next to the ads. Simultaneously, selecting a whitelisting would drain the advertising spend faster than campaigns without them, but what feature doesn’t come with drawbacks?
Step 2: Define the Exact Content Segments
The need to blocklist irrelevant content/context ad placements has already been established. By doing so, you would increase target reach, drive conversions, and increase revenue or ROAS.
Moreover, contextual targeting of products/services aligned with the brand personality help brands to reach a niche audience, instead of targeting the general population or wider nest of the category, a majority of which is not interested in the ad or just wants to research/explore it.
For example, your brand has recently launched a sedan car model and wants to increase sales. Brand suitability would ensure that the ads reach the relevant audience, boost brand awareness, and increase calls/queries related to the model by selecting the correct category niche and selecting a potential allowlist/whitelist.
Step 3: Validate Vendor Sources
Knowing the REAL sources of a publisher’s traffic is essential for many reasons. Primarily, your ad and competitor’s ads could get placed next to the same content. So, the reachability could get substantially hampered. But, even if that doesn’t matter, the “type of content” or the “content piece” should certainly matter, as irrelevant content can diminish ad campaign results and brand reputation.
But, validating the vendor sources doesn’t come as easy. Brands need to constantly monitor the placement of their ads on apps and websites, especially if they are using pre-and post-bid programmatic advertising platforms. Continuously updating the whitelist and blocklist of URLs would enhance ad relevancy and reach the target audience.
mFilterIt’s Brand Hygiene protection can offer this solution to brands and even trigger alerts whenever the ads appear on URLs not selected by the brand. This would keep the vendors or affiliates in check and enable the brand to avoid damage to its ROAS as well as brand reputation.
One Solution to Meet Ad Placement Needs of Your Brand
mFilterIt’s Brand Hygiene Protection covers all areas of brand, safety, brand infringement, and suitability, offering wholesome measures and results for dealing with misplaced ads, affiliate malpractices, etc.
The solution defines the optimal placement sources after analyzing the platforms and content pieces, without the influence of domain/URL miscategorization. Our contextual analysis enables us to avoid misplacements that harm the brand’s character. Moreover, the solution works after the brand defines the personality and uses GARM standards.
Brands can achieve higher relevance, revenue, and target audience by implementing mFilterIt’s Brand Hygiene Protection. The solution helps to keep ads away from unsafe environments, fraud affiliates, and untrustworthy publishers.
