Brand Safety & Suitability

Digital advertising has grown into a vast industry. Thousands of advertisers use advertising networks to publish their ads through millions of publishers. This scale in the ability to reach consumers is nothing short of a miracle, especially for smaller businesses trying to cut through the noise created by their larger competitors. However, thanks to the same scale, there are grave issues concerning all advertisers, regardless of the size of their business or advertising budget.   In this article, we are focusing on one of the most pressing issues faced by digital advertisers- tracking where their ads appear in the digital ecosystem. Why does it matter? Just as a good placement will drive more sales, a bad placement may result in a wasted ad budget or worse, it may end up harming your brand’s image.   This flaw in the way the digital ad industry operates has been exposed by a recent report published by Adalytics. According to the report, ads representing some of the biggest, most well-known brands across the globe were found to be hosted on websites that publish and host child sexual abuse material (CSAM).  The irreparable damage to brand reputation in such a case is not difficult to imagine. Thankfully, there’s a lot that advertisers can do to prevent their ads from being published with harmful or illegal content. This guide will walk you through all the steps you can take to protect your brand against such threats.  Let’s start at the beginning:  Step 1: Gain Visibility – Understanding Your Ad Placements  The first step to safeguarding your brand against problematic ad placements is to understand how ad placements are decided. One of the most common ways to publish ads at scale is to use programmatic ad platforms. These platforms, in theory, allow advertisers to precisely target specific audiences at scale, in real-time.   However, since programmatic platforms operate using a complex ecosystem of algorithms, supply-side platforms, and delivery-side platforms, advertisers have extremely limited visibility into their ad placements.   This was evident in the Adalytics report that highlighted big brand names like Amazon, Arizona State University, and even US Government Departments like the Office Of Texas Governor were found to be unaware of their ads appearing on a website that would also host CSAM content.   This lack of transparency on programmatic campaigns can be counteracted with the right tool.   One of the best ways to ensure that your ads are placed in a safe environment is by implementing a brand safety monitoring solution . mFilterIt’s brand safety tool makes use of real-time monitoring to help advertisers get transparency on their ad placements, where it is getting placed to ensure that their brand name is not associated with appraising advertisers about all the brand safety issues that they may be facing, presented through an actionable data points dashboard. The dashboard offers a categorized view of all unsafe content categories, along with risk levels and a detailed list of placements on which advertisers can take proactive action to safeguard their interests.  Step 2: Conduct Content Safety Analysis Once it is clear how ad placements are decided and you have set up the tracking for the same, it is time to ensure your ads are appearing next to contextually relevant content. While programmatic advertising promises the same, the CSAM case has made it clear that the content verification methods of ad networks are incredibly lacking.  Once again, a reliable brand safety tool can prove extremely handy in such a situation. The tool features a Content Safety Analysis feature that is designed to detect harmful content environments that may not be suited to hosting a specific advertiser’s ads. The tool should not just consider safe ad placements but monitor and flag content based on contextuality and relevancy.   Step 3: Check the Website’s Safety Parameters  Next, brands and advertisers must conduct individual website audits to determine whether a publisher is suited to host their ads. These checks are important because in many cases, a website may seem like a safe bet at a glance but may be holding questionable content within its deep pages. The website exposed in the Adalytics report is a good example of the same. At a glance, it seems like a safe image-hosting website. However, by monitoring the specific URLs one can identify harmful or illicit content websites like the CSAM content.  To make sure none of your ads appear on a questionable website, analyze the list of websites associated with an advertising platform on the following metrics: Website Basics: These include the URLs, titles, meta descriptions, and tags associated with the pages where the ads may appear. While these may seem like rudimentary aspects of website analysis, one may find themselves surprised at how much information these tidbits of a website contain.  Website History: This one may be familiar to many business owners. Checking the history of the website for instances of blacklisting from an advertising platform is a great way to ensure that the ads are appearing in a reputed publication. To be thorough, it is a good idea to also check for historical instances of policy violations.  Domain Safety: Advertisers must also give the domain of the publishers a second look to scan for terms that may not align with their brand safety standards.  Whois Information: The Whois Database is a superb resource for checking any website’s hosting details, credibility indicators, and the name(s) of the owner(s). This information can be used in conjunction with the website’s history and basics to make sure that the website in question truly fits within the brand’s safety guidelines.  These checks, when done thoroughly, can do wonders for ensuring your brand’s safety in the ad ecosystem. However, a typical ad network may have thousands of publishers suited to an advertiser’s targeting needs. Analyzing thousands of websites can prove to be cumbersome, to say the least. For such cases, a tool like PACE can be beneficial. It helps advertisers build an exclusion list and ensure that any of

If you’re currently managing YouTube Video Action Campaigns within Display & Video 360 (DV360), there’s a significant update on the horizon that you’ll need to prepare for. Started in October 2024, Demand Gen campaigns will become a core feature of DV360. This transition will expand your campaign capabilities, offering enhanced reach, new creative formats, and advanced audience targeting In this article, we’ll break down what this shift means, how it impacts your current campaigns, and the steps you can take to get ready for the change. What is Demand Gen in DV360? Demand Gen is a versatile campaign format designed to drive conversions through dynamic multi-format creative storytelling. With Demand Gen, you can now run both video and image ads within the same campaign line item. This brings more flexibility to your advertising efforts, enabling you to streamline workflows and craft more cohesive brand narratives. Key Advantages of Demand Gen: -Broader Reach: Engage with up to 3 billion monthly active users across Google’s vast ecosystem, including YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and other Google platforms. Unlike traditional YouTube Video Action Campaigns, you won’t be restricted to just YouTube for video placements. -Multi-Format Creativity: Demand Gen allows you to combine video and image creatives in a single campaign, simplifying management while ensuring that all your assets work seamlessly together to convey a unified brand story. -Advanced Audience Targeting: Leverage lookalike audiences to reach users who exhibit behaviors and interests similar to your existing customers. This feature is perfect for finding new potential customers who are most likely to engage with your brand. These capabilities make Demand Gen a powerful tool for marketers seeking to amplify their reach and drive higher conversion rates. In fact, according to internal Google data, campaigns that utilized both video and image assets experienced a 20% boost in conversions at the same cost per action when compared to campaigns that used video alone. The Transition from YouTube Video Action Campaigns Currently, many advertisers use YouTube Video Action Campaigns (VACs) to drive conversions within YouTube and its partner platforms. However, starting in 2025, YouTube Video Action Campaigns will transition into Demand Gen line items. Here’s what you need to know about the shift: Key Changes: -New Campaign Types: From March 2025 onwards, new YouTube Video Action Campaigns will no longer be supported in DV360. Instead, you will need to create Demand Gen campaigns. -Existing Campaigns: While your existing YouTube Video Action Campaigns will continue to run, transitioning to Demand Gen should be a priority. Familiarizing yourself with Demand Gen now will ensure a smooth transition and allow you to take full advantage of the new features before the change is mandatory. Though many of the functionalities from YouTube Video Action Campaigns, such as Floodlight optimization and third-party brand safety verification, will be preserved, it’s crucial to adapt to the new Demand Gen setup sooner rather than later. The earlier you start, the easier the transition will be. Maximizing the Impact of Demand Gen Campaigns in DV360: How mFilterIt can help advertisers The shift to Demand Gen campaigns within DV360 offers a significant opportunity for mFilterIt to enhance its pitch to advertisers, especially in terms of driving performance while ensuring brand safety solution . Here’s how mFilterIt can help brand capitalize on the new features of Demand Gen campaigns to offer valuable benefits to advertisers: -Enhanced Brand Safety & Ad Verification: With the expanded reach of Demand Gen campaigns, ensure that your ads are placed in safe, brand-compliant environments across YouTube, Gmail, Discover, and more, using mFilterIt’s robust ad verification and brand safety solution. -Advanced Audience Targeting and Optimization: Leverage mFilterIt’s audience optimization features alongside Demand Gen’s lookalike audience capabilities, ensuring you’re reaching the most relevant customers with the highest likelihood of conversion. -Cross-Platform and Multi-Format Campaigns: Simplify your cross-platform, multi-format campaigns with mFilterIt’s real-time reporting and optimization tools, ensuring both video and image creatives perform to their fullest potential. -Conversion Tracking and Floodlight Integration : Use mFilterIt’s integration with Floodlight to gain deeper insights into your Demand Gen campaign performance, ensuring you’re driving more conversions and optimizing your ROI. -Transparency & Reporting : Get complete transparency into the performance of your Demand Gen campaigns across all formats and platforms with mFilterIt’s comprehensive reporting tools, empowering you to make informed decisions. -Improved Efficiency with Automated Brand Safety Checks : Streamline your workflow and ensure continuous brand safety across all your multi-format Demand Gen campaigns with mFilterIt’s automated monitoring and real-time protection. Conclusion: With the introduction of Demand Gen campaigns in DV360, advertisers have a unique opportunity to expand their reach and connect with the right target audience. Clubbing this new feature mFilterIt has a unique opportunity to position itself as a crucial partner for advertisers. By offering robust brand safety, performance optimization, advanced audience targeting, and transparent reporting, mFilterIt can help advertisers navigate the complexities of multi-format campaigns and make the most of their expanded reach across Google’s ecosystem. This comprehensive approach can boost both the effectiveness and security of Demand Gen campaigns, ultimately driving better results for advertisers. Want to get a demo of how we do it? Contact our team today 

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

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.