How Brands Can Deal with The Brand Safety Problem

With brands increasingly moving into digital advertising, more and more issues concerning brand safety and ad fraud are coming into the spotlight.

Video advertising has now become an indispensable part of a brand’s digital advertising strategy. Thus, ensuring brand safety on YouTube has also become highly important for brands. A few years back, a grave YouTube and Google brand safety issue surfaced when Guardian withdrew its ads from Google and YouTube after it found its ads placed next to extremist content. Last year, another news broke out that ads of more than one hundred top brands have been found running on YouTube videos promoting climate misinformation.

The Google and YouTube brand safety issues have prompted brands to question their marketing teams on the measures they are taking to ensure the running of their digital ads in an environment that is not only brand-safe but also aligns well with the nature of their business.

If in case, a brand is handling digital advertising in-house, then the responsibility of creating and implementing a brand safety policy lies entirely on that brand. The brand should ensure that all safety mechanisms are in place and the latest technology is being used. However, if a brand has partnered with an ad agency for running its digital ad campaigns, then the responsibility of ensuring brand safety and suitability should be shared between the two; the brand should create its brand suitability and safety policy, while the agency should implement it rigorously.

Private marketplaces are increasingly becoming popular among brands. A private marketplace involves programmatic buying and selling of ads only between exclusive parties. In sharp contrast to an open marketplace, a private marketplace is invite-only, i.e., select advertisers are invited by publishers to bid on exclusive ad spaces. When using private marketplaces, brands know the publishers from whom they are buying ad spots, and this ensures them that their ads will be displayed in a brand-safe environment. But private marketplaces have their own limitations.

A simple but traditional method of ensuring brand safety in programmatic advertising involves the use of black and white lists. A blacklist contains keywords that are considered unsafe or unsuitable for a brand. Ads are not displayed against content carrying the blacklisted keywords. Keyword blacklisting brand safety solutions often lead to over-blocking of content, thereby reducing reach.

A whitelist is a curated list of websites that a brand thinks are totally safe and suitable for its ads. Besides decreasing reach significantly, the creation of whitelists is a costly affair and requires regular curation in order to include new brand-safe content.

AI-powered contextual brand safety technology is the latest and the most effective solution to the brand safety menace. approaches. Contextual brand safety powered by artificial intelligence are able to effectively comprehend nuances in context, thus providing complete brand safety along with brand suitability without reducing an advertising campaign’s reach.

These solutions not only enable brands to place their ads safely against textual content but also against visual content, i.e., images and videos, as AI can effectively detect brand unsafe or inappropriate contexts in images and videos.

To ensure brand safety in its true sense, brands should clearly define what is inappropriate for them and must use AI-powered brand safety solutions.