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

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.