Brand safety tech is a scalpel, not a blunt knife
John Snyder, Grapeshot CEO, explains how brand safety is a notion that is still every bit as relevant today as it was when it first became an important concept in digital advertising years ago.
John Snyder, GrapeShot, CEO
Brands still basically want assurance that their messages are delivered to and received by consumers as well as engaged by them as intended. But as challenges like fraud and viewability have come to the fore, brand safety has taken on layers of complexity and specificity that weren’t there previously. Quite simply, digital advertising has wrought an environment with billions of impressions being served across millions of pages both programmatically and directly to myriad devices and screens seen by innumerable users.
How can an ad be in a “pure” environment that’s attractive for the brand and comfortable for the consumer? What happens when a brand’s desire to reach desirable consumers is in tension with the content on a page? How can advertising become truly welcome? The answers vary in degrees depending on the personality of a given brand.
Brands range from the most staid to quirky, daring, and even controversial, but by and large, regardless of the relative personalities, there are essentially three legs to brand safety. First of all, ads must be viewable. Global leaders in media buying with billions of dollars to spend are demanding viewability far beyond the current Media Ratings Council (MRC) industry standard (at least 50% in view for one second for most display ads). Secondly, ads must be seen by real people, not bots. Rooting out fraud is equally as important as viewability verification. The third leg of the brand safe stool is that ads must be contextually appropriate.
By applying human intelligence to leading technology, marketers can leverage compatible content that optimizes its messaging and even supports wider initiatives.
A brand-safe environment is fundamentally not hostile; will not cause awkward associations or, worse, spur controversy in sharing and commenting.
The price of an error can range from the opportunity cost of having to craft defensive counter-messaging to even diminished sales. The degree of damage can be attributed to a range of primary factors:
Timing: Issues can arise seemingly out of nowhere at lightning speed and require rapid response. The best contextual technology will serve as an early warning system, alerting a brand that something may be amiss, and help take needed steps to block unfortunate placements.
Relevance: True relevance is affected by a more nuanced and granular analysis of page content beyond the traditionally limited pre-determined list of categories defined via simple URL matching. To truly grasp relevance, the interconnectedness of words on a page must also be weighted accordingly.
Adjustment: Some day, technology may facilitate a “set it and forget it” approach to brand safety. But for now, a vigilant commitment to monitoring requires the constant evolution of settings as further input in terms of fresh data accrues. Until recently, it would require days or even weeks for a brand’s safety protocol to adjust media plans in a corrective manner. Even today some brand campaigns are completely stopped until a big issue passes – for example when News is littered with extremely bad news.
To date many contextual brand safety mechanisms have been so blunt force, they’ve seemed like “on-off” switches. Today’s best contextual partners, by contrast, can finely tune and adjust with a range of controls. Blanket exclusions based on typical “poison” words often do the marketer a disservice by unnecessarily punishing a publisher’s content. Many brands, for example, would be fine appearing on Playboy’s more reputable pages. Subtlety and nuance applied as a result of a highly consultative process that truly understands the particular client’s needs, will both protect the brand while still achieving brand objectives like scale. With well-tuned contextual parsing and segmenting, the marketer will be given a scalpel, rather than a crude knife.
The only way to guarantee airline safety is to never fly while total abstinence is the only foolproof form of safe sex. Similarly, the only way to ensure absolute brand safety is to never advertise, which of course, is completely impractical and detrimental for all brands. But in the attempt to mitigate risk, some marketers make the mistake of casting too wide a net in protecting themselves whereby 30% of desirable pages are unnecessarily blocked.
Combinations of factors determine brand safety — not just words, but also spacing, frequency, phrasing, and analysis that mandates the best of technology and human beings working together. The risks can come unexpectedly in both programmatic and non-programmatic environments. Pages may have unsafe images, video or graphics with no textual reference. Fraudsters may intentionally mask or spoof URLs, requiring a second tier factor for identification.
But over time, these issues will be solved. The technology is better than ever, as is our understanding. It’s faster, easier to use, offers greater transparency and assurance and will continue to improve.