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Smart Contextual Ads: AI-ML Checks for Perfect Ad Placements

Blog, Brand Safety & Suitability /

The challenge isn’t just about reaching an audience—it’s about reaching the right audience in the right context. It’s about ensuring ads are placed in settings that resonate with users and amplify engagement. Contextual advertising offers a powerful way to do this leveraging AI and machine learning (ML) to elevate contextual ad targeting to new heights. It allows highly relevant and brand-safe ad placements that are strategically aligned with brand goals.    Let’s explore how AI-ML tech can redefine contextual ad placement and ensure each ad resonates with precision.   Contextual Ad Targeting with AI–ML  Context Matters! Users today are more receptive to ads that fit seamlessly into the content. They engage with relevant placements while irrelevant placements can feel intrusive. Contextual relevancy ensures that an ad appears alongside content that complements the ad’s message.   With AI-ML-powered contextual targeting, brands can go beyond basic keyword matching to place ads at relevant spots and engage seamlessly across web, video, OTT, or social media platforms.    Ensure the placement aligns with brand campaign goals and is contextually relevant for the audience covering multiple aspects to ensure relevancy.   Keyword search with contextual understanding: Discover optimal ad placements across digital platforms. AI-ML-powered tools help ensure that each ad appears in a relevant context and reaches an audience more likely to engage. Contextual targeting AI goes deep into page content, identifying keywords, themes, and semantics to ensure the ad aligns well with the page’s overall subject matter. That’s where text analysis isn’t enough without contextual understanding evaluating the meaning and sentiment behind keywords to ensure the ad placement fits with the page’s context.  AI-enabled Frame-by-Frame Video Analysis: For video ads, frame-by-frame analysis identifies visual cues, themes, and context within video content, ensuring that ads appear in safe and relevant video settings. Identify objects, faces, logos, audios, actions, on-screen texts, sentiments, and more. This prevents ads from appearing in irrelevant or unsuitable content, enhancing the viewer experience.  Sentiment Analysis: Sentiment analysis allows AI to detect the emotional tone of content, filtering placements to avoid negative or controversial content that may harm a brand’s image. By identifying emotions, symbols, and tones, brands can be sure their ads appear only in positive or neutral environments.  Image analysis: With image recognition, AI scans visuals to detect symbols, logos, and content quality, further ensuring ads don’t appear next to unsuitable, sign, symbols or low-quality imagery.   Brand Relevancy and suitability for effective targeting  Push the limits of contextual brand suitability with AI across content your users are actively engaging with, and analyze your videos in real-time to check content, context, sentiments, engagement metrics, and organic influence for ad alignment.  Identify if the ad placement is suitable or not based on inputs such as:   Ad Briefs   Target Audience   Target Geography   Engagement   Brand Safety   Brand Ambassadors  This helps whitelist ad placement and provides contextually relevant ad placement for brands across web and video ad platforms.   Contextual Brand Relevance enables advanced AI-based contextual level targeting that focuses on elements, logos, faces, keywords, objects, sentiments, and more for brands to choose right ads at the right place.  Set custom inclusion and exclusion themes specific to each brand’s risk tolerance levels  Brand safety without over-blocking filters out unsafe content before an ad impression is served  Content-aligned brand protection that combines brand safety with context, leading to higher ROI  mFilterIt provides custom targeting and exclusion themes and accurate detection of unsafe content across a comprehensive set of brand safety categories as per the GARM guidelines.  Make your brand stand out with Contextual Targeting mFilterIt covers multiple platforms that include YouTube, Instagram, OTT and various formats like Open Web, Videos, Facebook, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, OTT shows or episodes to enhance brand recognition & recall with appropriate ad targeting at the right place.  The targeting capabilities include:    Demographical and geographical – Age, gender, countries, regions, cities, languages, etc.   Device targeting – Laptops, tablets and mobiles Context-relevant video level – Logo, emotions, audio, landscape and locations, etc. Conditional targeting – Keywords, reels & shorts, and other platform-recommended video and open web, etc.   Ad Performance optimization with Contextually relevant placement   Precision Targeting with High-Intent Users: AI-ML contextual ad targeting doesn’t just place ads in relevant content, but it also reaches the relevant audiences with a high likelihood of engagement. With high user intent and genuine content interactions, ad placements are likely to yield better results with more precision, more conversion, and enhanced return on investment (ROI).  Enhanced VTR and Click-Through Rates (CTR): Contextually relevant placements generate higher View Through Rate (VTR) and Click-Through Rates (CTR). More users watch the entire ad when ads appear in content that genuinely interests users, they are more likely to watch, click, and engage, resulting in higher performance metrics.  Customized Placement Based on Campaign Goals: AI-ML tools allow brands to customize placements based on specific campaign goals, whether they aim for brand awareness, lead generation, or direct conversions. This flexibility means that every ad placement aligns with the strategic purpose of the campaign.  Advantages of leveraging mFIlterIt for Contextual Ad Targeting:  Precise content curation: Ensures only content-aligned, high-performing, and brand-suitable videos pass-through for final ad placement.   Granular targeting: Narrows affinity-based targeting to control who your ad reaches – while minimizing ad waste.   Higher engagement: Ad alignment across relevant and high-performing content ensures your ad reaches your target audience in a desired environment. Enhanced user experience: Users experience ads that are relevant to their current state of mind, leading to higher engagement.   Positive brand recall: Contextually relevant ads are less intrusive and more engaging, leading to a more positive brand recall, clicks, and views.   Data privacy compliance: Reach your most engaged audience, without collecting reams of personal data.  Conclusion  Contextual advertising powered by AI-ML technology has created unprecedented opportunities for brands to reach audiences in the most relevant and impactful way. It not only checks for keywords to identify relevancy but also conducts contextual content analysis, image analysis, natural language processing,

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Affiliate Fraud

Affiliate Fraud: Detect, Defend & Protect your Brand

Blog, Brand Safety & Suitability /

Affiliate marketing has emerged as one of the most viable sales promotion strategies that brands employ today. However, the rapid rise in affiliate marketing fraud has become a significant concern, as businesses can lose hundreds of billions every year with fraudulent activities. Affiliate marketing campaign are not excluded from these schemes, and mFilterIt reports indicate that affiliate fraud may result in the potential loss of up to 30-35%. For most businesses, affiliate advertising fraud wastes promotional, and marketing spends, which would be recovered with smart monitoring tools.   What is Affiliate Fraud?   Affiliate ad fraud refers to the fraudulent acts of malicious affiliates that exploit the system to wrongly earn commissions. They go through marketing procedures in the wrong manner and are making false conversions, clicks, or leads, which inflates the marketing metrics and ad spends for a brand without giving a good ROI on the campaign. According to Influencer Marketing Hub, affiliate marketing is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.1%.   Hence, the need for efficient tools to detect and prevent ad fraud is more important to optimize spending, minimize losses, and protect brand integrity.   Why is affiliate fraud so serious?   It is a very significant reason to distinguish why affiliate fraud should not be taken lightly because it usually leads to severe financial losses and damage to the reputation of the brands. The issues range from ad fraud, both general and sophisticated, to matters such as brand infringements and fake brand communication by affiliates, in which the unethical affiliates misuse the brand resources for personal gain.   Ad Fraud Impact   Affiliate ad fraud undermines ad effectiveness because it artificially inflates conversion metrics. Ad fraud issues like lead punching, ad stacking where several ads are layered to get impressions, and fake clicks impact brands. Over time, these acts prove counterproductive to marketing efficiency, present misleading data, and tremendous brand loss. In an environment where ad budgets are significantly constricted, failure to focus on these types of fraud will be detrimental to the long-term success of the campaign.   Concerns with Brand Infringements with Affiliates   Affiliate infringements are far more prevalent than traditional ad fraud. That is a set of practices that are unethical and could damage the reputation of a brand. This includes a practice known as brand bidding, in which the trademark of a brand is used to drive traffic to their sites, or the use of influencer coupon codes to inflate sales metrics artificially. Very often, affiliates would also make IP violations such as typo-squatting, a method that uses small misspell of the brand’s URL to route traffic to harmful websites. Such violations not only compromise the overall effectiveness of the affiliate campaign but also erode the trust created between the brand and its legitimate affiliates.   Types of Affiliate Ad Campaigns Brand must Track for Full-Funnel Protection   There are different types of affiliate fraud contingent upon the commission structure of the campaign, and they may be classified as follows:   Cost-Per-Click (CPC)   In this, for every click on an ad, the affiliate would make money. It is prone to click fraud wherein bots and click farms inflate the number of clicks but engage no real customer.   Cost-Per-Leads (CPL)   The affiliates are paid according to customer actions such as the form submissions and signing up on emails. In this aspect, the most common tactic fraudsters would use is fake leads or invalid customer actions.   Cost-Per-Sale (CPS)   Affiliates get paid according to commissions on sales that are completed. Manipulation with this model typically happens through the pushing of fake transactions or exploiting return policies for gaining commissions from sales later reversed.   Common Issues in Ad Fraud    Of course, ad fraud manifests in many ways, and the most common categories included are listed below:   Lead Punching- Bad or low-quality leads are generated to earn a commission. These convert into no sales, and hence marketing dollars go to waste.   Organic Poaching- They steal the organic traffic and dupe tracking systems to earn commissions for sales they never help make.   Ad Stacking- Here, multiple ads are overlapped on top of one another in unnoticeable ways in which impressions are created that seem to be real but do not engage the user.   IP & Proxy – There are certain techniques that are used in affiliate marketing fraud and these fraudulent schemes are carried out by creating malicious locations using IP spoofing and proxy servers to generate fake traffic and clicks that cannot be traced.  Imperceptible Window – Techniques used include showing advertisements through small, transparent or overlay ads that are not seen by the user hence resulting in fake impressions or fake clicks without the knowledge of the user.  Click Fraud – It occurs when a company’s automated bot or dishonest user simply repeats online advertisements or incurs damages to the clicked ad in order to exhaust most of the company’s resources.  Brand Infringement Issues for Affiliates   Affiliates’ infringement includes unauthorized uses that compromise a brand’s intellectual property or marketing efforts. Affiliate infringements include the following, though not limited to:   Brand Bidding- Affiliates use a brand’s keywords or trademarks while competing with that brand. This type of practice has increased costs to a brand and easily confuses consumers.   Duplicate Products- Sometimes, affiliates make duplicate products that dilute brand presence, present various prices at these sub-sites while making others unavailable and bring discrepancies in pricing.   Misuse of Influencer Coupon Codes- Some affiliates distribute the influencer coupon codes to people beyond the intended reach. Doing this implies that the sales metrics inflated do not represent genuine consumer intent behind it.   Violations with IP and Typo-Squatting- Affiliates open up fake websites that resemble the domain of the brand closely and capture the misdirected traffic thus misleading consumers.   Brand Information Misrepresentation- Affiliates often give false information about a brand’s products or services that smear the brand’s reputation and result in revenue loss.   How mFilterIt protected a Global FinTech Brand from Affiliate Fraud   A leading fintech player collaborated with mFilterIt to fight affiliate fraud on a global scale. mFilterIt affiliate

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Brand safety

Protect your Brand Reputation with Safety & Brand Infringement Suite

Blog, Brand Safety & Suitability /

Consider your brand being placed alongside unsuitable content or falling victim to a fraudulent website that affects your image and reputation. Brand reputation is a fragile asset related to its online presence through ad placements across digital platforms.   According to an advertising standards study, about 35% of Indian brand companies faced reputational damage due to misleading advertisements. Digital brand infringement, such as fake websites and social media handles, led to a loss of up to 25% in the market share of various well-known brands.    The irrelevant ad placements and fake websites may quickly harm the reputation of the brand. The damage extends beyond consumer perception. It can lead to diminished sales, loss of customer trust and cost brands long-term financial loss.    Concerns related to brand safety    Brand safety risks develop when ads appear in circumstances that undermine a brand’s image or don’t align with the real values of the brand.    Here is a breakdown of the common concerns related to losing brand reputation:   Irrelevant and unsafe ad placement: Placing ads alongside irrelevant content results in the ineffectiveness of the ad campaign. Issues relating to ads being placed on harmful and unsafe content spoil brand image and do not bring any positive campaign metrics.     Brand Infringement & Safety Issues: It involves risks such as brands visible alongside inappropriate irrelevant material such as hate speech, or violent abusive content.    Issues come due to irrelevant placement of ads    Branding campaign wastage: if ads reach the wrong audience diminishing the desired outcomes efforts and disconnect between the brand and the viewers.    Maximum Ad skips: if the ads appear in irrelevant & unsuitable settings viewers skip them as it is not important to them, or they are more interested in the content   Loss of true views when ads are not delivered to the right audience in appropriate context’ brands lose the chance of gaining genuine connections. Leading to wasted views and ineffective ad spending.    Brand Unsafe placements could include the appearance of an ad alongside explicit content that violates the brand safety guidelines such as those of GARM. Various categories of ad placements cause major reputation damage to the brand.    Unsafe Categories of ad Placements causing major reputation harm    Illegal Drugs Tobacco E-cigarettes Vaping Alcohol   Terrorism   Online Piracy  Adult and explicit content   Arms and ammunition   Spam or Harmful content   Death injury or military conflict   Crime & Harmful acts to individuals and society   Debated sensitive social issues   Hate speech and act of aggression   Solution  Most above-mentioned unsafe categories require an actionable approach that will ensure brands get protected on all fronts and mFilterIt solution carries a comprehensive way to deal with unsafe media advertisement placements.   The key elements of the solution included robust region-specific Content Categories content context analysis, sentiment analysis, video frame recognition, and GARM compliance.       It is done through not only keyword searches and meta tags in the description and title but also AI & ML-driven context analysis and sentiment analysis to ascertain relevancy. Furthermore, the frame recognition strategy involves analyzing individual frames of video content where the ads are placed rather than relying on the metadata only. And lastly the,    enabling active prevention of brand protection with real-time blocking of brand-unsafe videos was undertaken.    Let’s understand this with a case study.  Case study   A large FMCG brand encountered issues with video placements where heavy ad expenditure resulted due to brands content association with explicit content.   To address this issue a brand safety solution was initiated by mFilterIt, and the following results were obtained.     Realtime blocking helped in reduction of brand unsafe percentage   Impact on business: After identifying the brand unsafe placements the solution started blocking them actively and brand unsafe % declined from 10.73% in Sep 2023 to 1.81% by April 2024, it also observed high ad performance on Brand safe videos as compared to explicit videos.  Brand Infringement   Brand Infringement occurs due to violation and unauthorized use of name, logo, trademark, patents or copyrights of the company or brand.   TRA’s Brand Trust Report says that trust decline to negative brand association and brand infringements in sectors like FMCG and Pharms and top brands trusted dips of up to 20%.   A wide range of brand infringement capabilities can be seen that hamper the reputation of the brand.   Intellectual property Infringement   Fake social media handles   APK Copycat Apps   Fake brand’s communication like emails   ATO (Account Takeover)   Logo Misuse   Phishing websites   Solution  mFilterIt proprietary OSINT tech with the use of Open-Source Intelligence, scans the entire digital landscape for identifying possible infringements. AI-Powered automation by which the process of cleaning, tagging, and classification of enormous data gathered through OSINT.    The 3-pillar approach solution can be applied to managing and addressing these brand infringement issues if faced by any brand or company.    Identification of the list of official brand assets such as the official logo, social media handles, and instant messaging handles. Classification based on potential instances of the above-mentioned infringement capabilities Action included takedowns and blacklisting to clean and refurbish the lost trust in the brand. Let’s understand the whole approach with a successful case study of a construction company.   A well-known real estate firm faced various challenges of brand infringement in the form of IPR infringement and fraud occurring on digital and social media platforms. It was challenging to track and monitor violations manually.    mFilterIt deployed a solution to scan the multiple digital platforms for solving the potential infringements. The content gathered through OSINT like text videos and images was given a confident score produced by ML. Based on high and low confidence scores the classification is done for further action.    The impressive impact can be seen on the real estate firm between Jan- Jun 2024:    Cases were found around 1300 with 1001 successful removal of instances of illegal content. Across 7 platforms from

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contextual-advertising

Role of Contextual Advertising in the USA Ad Landscape

Leave a Comment / Blog, Brand Safety & Suitability, USA /

The fascinating world of advertising is witnessing the rise of contextual advertising. Now, advertisers are reaching out to a more relevant audience with precise targeting and ad contextual relevancy. Relevant ad placement reaches the audience interested and views similar types of content. Let’s explore how the contextual ad landscape in the USA Contextual advertising in the USA ad Market The United States is the largest contextual advertising market worldwide. According to Statista, in 2023, contextual advertising spending was estimated at $227.38 billion on the global level. The ad spends are expected to further beyond two folds rise by 2030 approximately $562.1 billion. The use of AI and machine learning algorithms has led to wider acceptance of contextual advertising that improves targeting and upgrades ad placements. Huge amounts of data including content-based context, and user behavior are monitored to provide custom-made and relevant advertisements. Contextual advertising is witnessing a rise in demand for privacy-focused targeting solutions due to increased concerns over data privacy and regulatory scrutiny. Instead, depending on invasive data-collecting techniques, and a cookie-less ad ecosystem, advertisers are investigating alternate approaches to audience targeting. Benefits of Contextual Advertising Navigating the evolving landscape requires contextual ad targeting. Here are some perks of contextual advertising: Data Privacy Compliance Contextual ads are an alternative to behavioral ads that need to comply with laws regarding data privacy, including the CCPA and GDPR. Moreover, contextual ads don’t entirely depend on cookies or user-specific data, it is easier to deal with privacy requirements. It respects the privacy of users’ data and ensures your ad reaches a genuine and relevant audience. Targeting Desired Audience Another advantage is that it accurately targets the audience based on their interaction with the desired content. Depending on the interests and needs of the users, contextual ads help marketers by monitoring the context of a webpage, app, or other digital platforms to regulate their advertisements. Enhanced User Experiences The user experience is highly influenced by contextual advertising, rather than providing consumers with generic advertisements. They deliver ads that perfectly blend with the surrounding context, which results in a seamless experience. Impact of Contextual Advertising Contextually relevant ad placement ensures more engagement and efficient ad performance with better returns on investments. Market Expansion and Economic Effects The increasing dependency on digital content and the developments in AI and machine learning which improve the efficiency of contextual ad placements push forward the growth in the US market which has a major impact on the US. digital advertising business, which is among the biggest in the world. Improved Interaction with Customers Contextual advertising increases consumer engagement by displaying appropriate advertisements based on the content that customers are viewing. Based on the relevancy, it enables the rise in click-through and conversion rates. For instance, instead of a makeup brand ad, a protein shake advertisement on a fitness blog is more likely to attract readers’ attention and increase engagement. ROI and Cost-Efficiency In comparison to other digital advertising formats that entirely depend on user data, contextual advertising is more affordable. Advertisers can gain a higher return on investment (ROI) and accurate targeting at a much lesser cost by concentrating on context rather than custom-made user profiles. Brand safety and relevancy in Contextual advertising Contextual Brand Safety refers to strategies and technologies used to ensure that advertisements appear in appropriate and relevant content environments, thereby protecting the brand reputation. This approach focuses on analyzing the context of web pages and digital content to avoid placing ads next to harmful, controversial, or inappropriate material. Contextual Brand Relevancy enables AI-based contextual level targeting that focuses on elements, logos, faces, keywords, objects, sentiments, and more for brands to choose the right ads at the right place. We provide custom targeting and exclusion themes and accurate detection of unsafe content across a comprehensive set of brand safety categories as per the GARM guidelines. For Instance, your ad campaign is about a man’s fashion brand featuring offers, promotion, and image of celebrity actor Ranveer Singh. This sort of ad needs to feature videos that talk about fashion or feature the same celebrity. Identifying such relevant videos will help reach an audience with similar interests. By using PACE Brand Relevancy, you can identify the text, logo, element, and keyword using AI-ML tech and keyword search & analysis capabilities to fetch URLs of contextually relevant videos for ad placement. Conclusion Contextual advertising is not just a trend but a fundamental shift. It ensures that ad creative and placements align with the brand’s vision and help reach its target audiences in meaningful and effective ways. Brand relevancy solution empowered with advanced AI-based contextual level targeting identifies elements, logos, faces, keywords, objects, sentiments, and more for brands to choose the relevant content for ad placement across advertising platforms. Get in Touch with us to learn more about contextual ads.

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brand safety protect your brand integrity in the digital ecosystem

Brand Safety: Protect Your Brand Integrity in The Digital Ecosystem

Leave a Comment / Blog, Brand Safety & Suitability /

Imagine working countless hours to perfect your brand identity and persona, only to have it decimated in the mind of a potential customer in a matter of seconds. This isn’t a hypothetical horror story. Most brand owners and teams spend considerable time and even more effort building their brand. It’s a harsh reality for many brands in the recent past. The culprit? Lack of vigilance to ensure brand safety. What Is Brand Safety? Brand safety, in simple words, refers to the practice of ensuring branded content does not appear next to unsavory explicit, or offensive content. While most advertisers are painfully aware of their limited control over the placement of their ads, their consumers are not as discerning as them. A few years ago, a media buying agency pulled its advertising budgets from YouTube and Google Display advertising platforms because of an article highlighting the appearance of ads next to neo-nazi and other forms of extremist content. Just like the placement of ads next to ‘wrong’ content is bad for the brand’s perception, placement of the same ads next to complementary content can potentially drive better results. Ensuring the same is known as ensuring brand relevancy in digital advertising. Both brand safety and relevancy are closely related topics and thus, may be confused with each other. However, in the high-stakes game of branding and advertising, there is no space for such confusion. Difference between Brand Safety and Brand Suitability Brand safety is all about ensuring your branded content does not appear next to anything that can be deemed offensive or extremist, or any type of content that your brand does not support. Common examples of such content include hateful content, violence, content that is offensive to a certain section of society, or content being used to spread misinformation. In some cases, scandals involving influencers that are associated with a brand also qualify as brand safety concerns. Imagine a scenario where a health food ad running on video that contains violence or an ad made for adults featuring in Kid’s videos. On the other hand, brand suitability refers to ensuring your brand’s content or ads appear next to positive and possibly relevant content. Brand suitability considerations take into account the context, meaning, and potential impact of a publisher’s content concerning the brand’s needs and audience. In other words, brand suitability goes beyond the scope of brand safety (preventing brand content from appearing next to offensive content) and ensures that the brand’s content appears in a positive environment. For instance, a ‘positive’ environment for an automotive ad would be very different from a positive environment for an ad for dog food. If the ad for dog food appears next to content about rescuing animals, it will probably perform better than the same ad appearing next to content about cars. Impact of association of a brand with negative content So what do the consumers feel when they see their favorite brand’s ad appearing next to an article talking about violence in Ukraine? When a consumer views a brand’s ad placed next to the ‘wrong’ type of content, they may think that the brand supports the adjacent content. This isn’t an empty claim. According to a brand safety study, 49% of consumers say that they start perceiving a brand negatively when they see that brand’s content appearing next to offensive content. What happens next? They screenshot the page and share it with their network. In the blink of an eye, the brand has a reputation crisis on its hands. Once again, this claim is supported by research that showed 75% of surveyed brands had been exposed to brand safety concerns in 2022. Why is Brand Safety and Suitability non-negotiable? Concerning digital advertising, both brand safety and suitability are non-negotiable concerns in 2024, but for different reasons. With so much content being published on the web every day, brand safety concerns are growing by the day. There are millions of pieces of content that can potentially ruin a brand’s image, should its ads appear next to them. And this effect can unfortunately be long-lasting. In extreme cases, brand safety concerns can cause permanent and irreversible damage to a brand’s image. Consider the investment of time, effort, and money that goes into establishing a brand. All of that can go down the drain in a single moment, just because one active internet user viewed the brand’s ad appearing next to something they find offensive. In other words, when it comes to brand safety, the stakes are high and the margin for error is alarmingly slim. On the other hand, brand suitability is non-negotiable because it allows brands to tap into the full potential of their advertising efforts. Sure, clickbait and controversies are still grabbing a lot of attention, but conversions are happening in positive environments. Research conducted by Pinterest shows that 60% of consumers are more likely to remember brands that they encounter when they are feeling positive. In the digital context, content is a great influencer of emotions. This means that ads appearing next to positive content are likely to perform better than the same ads appearing next to neutral or worse, negative content. In the same survey, two out of three respondents said that it is the brand’s responsibility to ensure their ads appear next to relevant and positive content and not adjacent to negative content. Need for Brand Safety Monitoring and Brand Relevancy for Targeting Until recently, brands and advertisers had little to no control over where their ads appear. With hundreds of new publishers being added to advertising platforms every day, the risk of brand safety and the gaps in brand suitability are growing exponentially. mFilterIt helps brands navigate the murky waters of the digital advertising world by offering real-time online brand protection for their ad campaigns. Our brand protection solution are powered by AI and ML technologies and they continuously ‘learn’ what kind of environment is right for your digital advertisements. This means, that with our solutions in your advertising arsenal, you can rest assured

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Brand Risk Safeguard Your Brand in the Digital Ecosystem

Brand Risk: Safeguard Your Brand in the Digital Ecosystem

Leave a Comment / Blog, Brand Safety & Suitability /

Building a brand is a challenging undertaking. Besides offering something unique, one has to put significant effort towards creating a unique identity that audiences like and relate to. Protecting a brand’s reputation may well be one of the most important aspects of an effective and holistic marketing strategy. Fortunately, modern marketers are becoming increasingly aware that modern brand reputations face threats online. In a survey of brand marketers, advertising agencies, tech companies, and media providers, conducted in the last quarter of 2022, 40% expected their brand safety concerns to rise. Identifying Threats to Digital Advertising Campaigns and the Need for Brand Risk Monitoring Unfortunately, maintaining a brand reputation can sometimes be more difficult than building it. Simply being aware that there are threats out there isn’t nearly enough. Marketers must understand the ever-evolving threats to digital advertising campaigns across app, web, and programmatic ad platforms and stay proactive to protect their advertising budget and brand reputation. This article will help you do exactly that. In the upcoming sections, we will discuss the most significant risks to brand reputation today. We will also cover actionable steps to implement brand safety advertising that enables safe and sustainable growth for your brand. 3 Major Brand Risk Many factors threaten a brand’s reputation online. While some are directly influenced by the brand’s actions, there are others that most brands don’t directly control. In this section, we will discuss three of the biggest, most prevalent threats from the advertising and brand safety point of view. Ad Fraud Ad fraud can take many forms, but the basic premise remains the same- faking clicks, impressions, or downloads to drain a brand’s marketing budget. Fraudsters take credit for these fake clicks or downloads and unsuspecting advertisers end up paying for them. Estimates say that advertisers collectively lose several billion dollars to ad fraud every year. While the connection between ad fraud and the monetary damage it causes is easy to make, one may wrongly believe that ad fraud does not pose a threat to a brand’s reputation. In fact, it influences a brand’s reputation in two different ways. Adult websites and MFA (Made-for-advertising) sites are some of the biggest sources of click spamming and impression fraud. While most brands actively avoid adult websites, fraudulent publishers can fake website information and get ads published on adult websites or MFAs. This drains ad budgets with fake clicks, shows the brand’s ad to a completely irrelevant and disinterested audience, and most importantly, hurts the brand’s image by showing its ads next to adult content (more on this in the next section) or on low-quality content sites. One of the most common methods of ad fraud is exploiting rewards offered by brands to boost their app downloads. Fraudsters create thousands of fake accounts to claim said rewards and drain the advertiser’s budget. Another way this hurts the brand is by depriving real and interested users of the rewards meant for them. When this kind of fraud happens on a large scale, many users don’t get what they are promised. This can deeply hurt the brand’s image and reputation and even turn away some users for good. Unsafe Ad Placement Most everyday users on the web don’t realize that brands have little direct control over where their ads are being displayed. That’s why, when a brand’s ads appear next to objectionable or extremist content, it can cause serious damage to its reputation. One of the most famous real-world examples of the same is the Applebee’s ad controversy. CNN played Applebee’s Dancing Cowboy campaign ad in the middle of a report on the Russia-Ukraine war. The viewers did not find this acceptable, and both brands faced serious backlash. Similar situations have played out online for several brands. Infringement Attacks Infringement attacks by fraudsters pretending to be representatives of a legitimate brand are also a growing threat to modern brands’ safety. While impersonation on social media is one of the most common instances of infringement attacks, fraudsters use more sophisticated ways to commit fraud while pretending to be a brand that thousands trust. Phishing attacks and domain spoofing are just a couple of the many such tactics employed by fraudsters to scam users who trust a brand. This can cause permanent damage to a brand’s reputation. This damage isn’t just limited to those who have fallen victim to these fraudulent activities. If news breaks out, it can negatively influence the trust of thousands of existing and potential customers. How To Create a Strategy for Growth and Safety? As mentioned earlier, there are actionable steps that marketers can take to protect their brand’s reputation. Let’s look at some of them: Validate Your Ad Traffic Ad traffic validation, as the name suggests, is the process of ensuring that your ads are not falling victim to fraud. It also ensures that your ads’ clicks or impressions come from real human users, not bots or click farms. Ad traffic validation can ensure ad fraud activities do not threaten your brand’s safety. Keep A Check on Your Ad Placements Advertisers must also make efforts to ensure their ads are not being displayed next to questionable or extremist content. By placing validation tags within the ad markup, advertisers can analyze the content of the websites where their ads are being displayed. This enables the blacklisting of problematic websites and allows advertisers to maximize the impact of their campaigns without putting their brand reputation in jeopardy. Conclusion Threats to brand safety are becoming increasingly evident and there are growing concerns amid advertisers. Such threats have become so prevalent that simply building awareness of them and how to combat them can provide advertisers with a competitive advantage against unsuspecting competitors. By taking simple steps such as validating ad traffic, tracking ad placements, and instances of infringement with mFilterIt, marketers can ensure their brand reputation remains protected during its growth journey. Get in Touch to know more about the Brand Risk.

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brand-safety

How to Keep Your Brands Safe Online: Problems and Solutions

Leave a Comment / Blog, Brand Safety & Suitability /

What are the threats to your brand online? In what ways can image security and ad safety be incorporated into your brand protection strategy? Over time, your new business will develop a reputation. Sadly, one of the risks of business success is the possibility of plagiarism, hacking, and data loss. Once you become a household name, consumers are more likely to purchase your well-established brand. With fame comes responsibility such as fending off counterfeit criminals who seek to capitalize on your brand name. This article discusses how digital images and digital advertising can hurt the reputation of your brand. Furthermore, we demonstrate how a combination of security against image theft and contextual targeting can provide robust security. What is brand protection? Brand protection is a security measure to guard against pirates, counterfeiters, and intellectual property infringers. You can use it to protect your company’s image, reputation, and revenue. Intellectual property (IP) includes creations of the mind, such as inventions, literary and artistic works, designs, as well as symbols, names, and images used in commerce. Brand infringement or brand abuse results from this unauthorized use. It can take various forms, ranging from counterfeiting to copyright infringement to brand impersonation. These tactics are designed to accomplish the same goal, which is allowing bad actors to exploit your brand’s reputation for their own benefit. The obvious consequence of this is the loss of revenue. What is arguably more important is that it can lead to trust erosion in your brand – and this can be devastating and lost lasting. Why protecting your brand online should be a matter of concern for you? Despite its widespread nature, brand abuse is well-established due to the rise of the internet. According to recent statistics, the global counterfeit goods market is estimated to grow to 2.8 trillion dollars by 2022. Through online shopping and auction fraud, UK residents alone lost £69 million last year. Because of the impersonal nature of online shopping and the internet’s global reach, fraudsters have been able to reach millions. Buying a product or service before e-commerce usually meant inspecting the product or speaking to a professional in person. It’s clear, though, that in modern times, we feel far more comfortable basing our buying decisions on what we see on screens with global retail e-commerce sales going from $1.34 trillion to $4.28 trillion by 2020. Can we really blame a less risk-aware shopper for clicking on the ‘buy’ button if the listing on a well-established e-commerce platform shows the correct logos, colors, designs, and sizes of a well-known brand? Digital images are used to abuse brands In order to convince online shoppers that a product is authentic, digital images are crucial. In a study, for example, 90% of shoppers rated the quality of photos as extremely or very important in their buying decisions. Figures like these highlight the importance of professionally taken images when it comes to building trust. Moreover, the threat goes beyond e-commerce listings. A fraudster could easily create a fake social media account, or even an entire imitation website, with high-quality, official brand photography freely available online. There are 137 million fake Facebook profiles, 5% of all Facebook profiles, and three billion phishing emails that typically send users to scam websites every day, which shows the scope of the problem. Damage to digital advertising Digital advertising is also a potential threat to your brand’s reputation – as reported by 99% of advertisers. Programmatic advertising has nearly eliminated human intervention in the ad-selection process. This complete automation has, on the one hand, improved efficiency for advertisers. On the other hand, it has resulted in a reduction in quality control, leading to big problems for both advertisers and publishers. Poor placement of ads Badly placed ads have become a common occurrence due to the ever-increasing complexity of online advertising. Only 2.8% of participants felt the last digital ad they saw was relevant, according to a study. It usually involves an ad showing up next to inappropriate content, and while it’s possible to find humour in unfair placements, there’s also a much more serious side. In a study, 70% of UK and 62% of US consumers said they would stop using a brand’s goods if its ads were near unsafe material. Ad placement, therefore, plays a critical role in the success of your advertising and, in turn, the protection of your brand. Errors in retargeting In retargeting, cookies are used to target users who have left a website without converting. You may have noticed that you were being retargeted online after searching for something one day and afterward seeing it everywhere. In some cases, digital advertising can be extremely effective, but it has some flaws. As an example, you may have rethought your decision since you visited the website, or you may have already bought the product in a store. It could even refer to a personal or sensitive product that you would prefer not to be reminded of. In either case, the outcome results in a disgruntled user, which is bad for advertisers and publishers alike. Bad ads Although bad content can have a detrimental effect on a brand’s digital ads, it can also work in the opposite direction. Ads with poor quality can be equally damaging to carefully curated content. In the digital world, the term ‘bad ads’ refers to digital ads that create a bad user experience. They may contain offensive or inappropriate content, advertise fraudulent products or services, or spread malware through a practice known as malvertising. Ads that do not work are problematic. Google alone removed and blocked 3.4 billion bad ads in 2021. Such an issue presents a real threat. Programmatic advertising’s anonymity allows bad actors to distribute this type of ad without being detected, so it’s imperative that you take the necessary security measures to protect your brand. Secure images to prevent brand abuse Securing all imagery associated with your product or service is an essential component of any brand protection strategy. The right protection prevents

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