What Is Brand Safety? Importance Of Brand Safety In Digital Advertising

Brand safety refers to the tools and strategies that ensure an online ad does not appear in a context that could potentially damage the advertiser’s brand & goals. Demand Side Platforms avail this brand safety feature to the marketers.
SRIDARAN BASKARAN

Marketers invest a huge amount in digital advertising for branding. Most of the time, the marketers feel that their ads are appearing in inappropriate places that could potentially damage their brand – Ads appearing on negative content, ads appearing on objectionable video channels, ads with competitor ads etc. Their requirement brings the concept of “Brand Safety”.

The advertising industry started talking about brand safety in 2017. At that time, youtube contains a large amount of offensive content and most of the ads appeared next to those videos. Many advertisers noted that their ads appeared next to violent and sexual content. So, they stopped their ad campaign on youtube. Big marketers like At&T, Walmart, and Verizon stepped out from youtube.

So, youtube took measures & improvements – removed many violent, anti-national, hate speech, and drug-promoting content from their platform. Also, it focuses on creating a content quality scanning system. Now, their content scanning system is so powerful and it removed any content that violates youtube standards.

What Is Brand Safety?

Brand Safety refers to the tools or strategies to ensure that the digital ads won’t appear on any content that could potentially damage the advertiser’s brand and goal. Such as video ads appearing on hate speech youtube channels, display ads appearing on drug & alcohol promoting content, and ads appearing on controversial content keywords present on website pages. The negative keywords depend upon the time and the advertiser. Recently, most advertisers have not been interested to show their ads on web pages that contain covid 19 keywords. Demand side platforms avail this feature to their advertisers.

IAB says, Brand safety refers to the strategy put into place to help ensure that online advertisements or associations do not appear on websites or in videos and articles that may conflict with a brand’s image, mission or goals (including online environments where media wastage – often related to viewability and fraudulent activity – is rife). Keeping a brand aligned with the values and mission of a company is paramount in a digital world where one erroneously placed ad can ruin its reputation.

Example for Brand Safety

These three simple examples will give a better understanding about BrandSafety.

Example 1 :

“One of the famous hotel shutdown in Chennai due to bad food quality” – Let’s consider this is the headline available on one news website. What happens when resort or hotel room booking or table booking ads appear on this page? There is no use to show the advertisement here. People get misled or misunderstood. Brand Name automatically gets damaged.

Example 2 :

“15 people dead in Malaysian Airlines Accident” – Let’s consider this is the headline available on one website. What do you think when you see “Trip Advertisement” on this page? First you will get irritated about this ad. Also 100% you won’t book for that trip.

Example 3 :

Example.com is a website that consists of information about English Medical Treatment. The main theme of this site is against English Medical Treatment. So there is no use for showing no 1 hospital ads on this site. Also, it will lead to negative thoughts and affect the hospital brand.

IAB – Dirty Dozen

IAB, The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is an advertising business organization that develops industry standards, conducts research, and provides legal support for the online advertising industry. IAB declared below 12 categories as “Dirty Dozen”. Normally these categories of sites are excluded or blocked by the advertisers.

1. Military conflict

2. Obscenity

3. Drugs

4. Tobacco

5. Adult

6. Arms

7. Crime

8. Death/injury

9. Online piracy

10. Hate speech

11. Terrorism

12. Spam/harmful sites

13. Fake news

Other than that which website theme or content conflicts with the Advertisers Brand those are also excluded from showing Advertisements.

Major third parties involved in Brand Safety

The demand side platforms work with third party verification vendors to give better service to the advertisers. Here are the few leading brand safety vendors,

MOAT

Integral Ad Science

DoubleVerify

Peer39

Grapeshot

Comscore

How Does Brand Safety Work In Real Time?

Pre Bid Verification :

Today most brand safety providers follow this technology to stop showing the ads on the wrong page. These brand safety vendors crawl the web pages available on the internet and categories them such as Educational, Inspirational, Sports, Medical, Gambling, Porn, etc.

Advertisers already include or exclude certain categories on demand side platfom. Every incoming bid request contains the target page URL information. If it is matched with the advertiser’s allowable category/nature then the advertiser’s ad appears on the corresponding web page. Otherwise, ad gets blocked and does not appear on the webpage. Very Very minimum time duration available for taking this decision.

Post Bid Verification technology is also available in the market. In this technology web pages analyzed by the provider after ads are served on a web page. By using this technology advertisers can make sure whether their ads show on an Appropriate Web Pages. If not they can take further action.

Viewability and Verification

As per IAS quote “For digital ads to make an impact, they have to be seen. Not just served. However, nearly half of all digital ads are not viewable. Make sure your ads have the opportunity to be seen by real people — wherever they are.”

These providers have the technology to account for the viewable impressions and also verify whether the ad is shown to humans or bots.

Ad Blocking

Advertisers create their campaigns in DSP’s and DSP’s provide an opportunity to access IAS\MOAT or else advertisers can also tie-up with IAS directly. Then IAS/MOAT/DV wrap their blocking tag with the actual ad tag. So wrapper tag load before the actual tag. When the wrapper tag loading target page url matched with their server. If it is matched/passed then the actual tag is permitted to show ad preview otherwise it’s blocked from showing ad preview.