Digital advertising is a huge industry and involves a lot of investment from brands both big and small. Brands want to ensure that their money is well spent and their ads are placed against brand safe content. Brand safety is one of the most important considerations for brands when it comes to online advertising.

Since last year, there has been a massive increase in morbidity and mortality-related content due to the pandemic. For most brands, ad adjacency to such content highly images damaging. According to a poll, the majority of consumers think that the responsibility for ensuring the placement of ads against safe content rests on brands. The poll also revealed that the majority of participants would be likely to stop using products or products of a brand if in case they found ads of that brand placed against inflammatory or fake content.

The aim of the advertising strategy should be to achieve ad placement across high-performance content while avoiding ad adjacency to unsafe and unsuitable content without killing reach. Marketers should bear in mind that along with the prevention of placement of ads against generic unsafe content such as terrorism, obscenity, etc., ads should also be avoided against content that is unsuitable for a specific brand. This tailored approach provides not only a brand safety environment but also ensures brand suitability.

In order to avoid the placement of ads against unsuitable content for a brand, marketers should have a clear understanding of the nature of the business of that brand along with its core values. For example, ads of a chocolate brand should not be placed against content that talks about dental health.

Marketers should also check which social and political topics are unsuitable for brands. Another thing that marketers should consider is that subtle differences exist between languages and cultures. What seems appropriate in one part of the world may be objectionable in another. Brand safety strategies for international brands should take into account differences in languages and cultures to provide more granularity in blocking.

Brands that use white lists and keyword-based solutions for preventing their ads from getting displayed against harmful or inappropriate content, often witness a significant reduction in reach. In order to ensure brand safety in programmatic advertising, a nuanced approach is required such as that provided by AI-powered brand safety solutions.

AI-powered solutions provide an environment for ad placement that is both brand safe and suitable, without killing reach. These solutions make use of artificial intelligence technology to detect unsafe and unsuitable contexts in both textual and video content. For those brands that leverage YouTube for advertising, these solutions ensure a high degree of YouTube brand safety.

By making use of AI-powered contextual brand safety solutions, marketers can effectively deal with the grave issue of brand safety.