Brand Safety is the concept of defining certain guidelines around how a brand is represented in advertising, in language used and in the user experiences that marketers create. This is done to make sure that every touchpoint with a customer is aligned with what the brand stands for and what it stands against.
Brand safety is often managed as a governing principle by the brand team. Larger enterprises are often a lot more stringent around brand safety and are often willing to absorb incremental technology costs to provide brand safety reports.
Is brand safety necessary?
Yes. An organization’s brand takes time to build It is important to have a well defined set of governing principles that protect brand equity. While safety is necessary, the kinds of rules that should fall under brand safety should not be set in stone and should be open to change as the times change. Also, these guidelines will be very unique to each industry and organization within it.
What kinds of rules should fall under brand safety when it comes to marketing?
Language: Every brand has a way of speaking and it is essential to maintain that consistency because customers believe in a brand’s voice. Any chance in the way a brand speaks with its customers will need to be well thought out.
- This ends up governing the kinds of creatives that come out for the brand.
Look and feel: This often ends up including details like:
- the kinds of images that can be associated with the brand in ads
- colors that can be used in an ad
- font size and font type
- any other details like
- brand logo can never be used without the brand line
- last frame of any display ad should end in the brand logo and brand line
Target Audience: Some premium/luxury brands often have brand safety guidelines that dictate who they can speak to or who should be their target audience. They often need this to maintain the exclusive nature of their brand which helps them command really high price from customers.
- This often leads to guidelines around choosing where to appear with ads (online as well as offline)
Things that a brand stands for and stands against: This is very often the most strict part of brand safety. This comprises of attitudes, causes, people, organizations, initiatives etc. that the brand supports and does not support. Any advertising that is being conducted would need to abide by these. While this list is often comprehensive, sometimes customer complaints lead to this list being updated.
- True Story: Ads for one of my financial services clients appeared on breitbart.com ( a right wing political site ) and a customer took a screenshot and tweeted to my client’s business page. Client had an internal connect and decided to ban that site and any politically inclined sites from showing our ads.
Are there any tools to enable brand safety for online marketers?
Yes. There are a lot of tools that enable brand safety through various features like:
- Reports listing all the locations (exact sites, site categories, article category, geographies etc) where ads were shown
- Pre-bid blocking to ensure that if a website or a web page is determined inappropriate for a brand’s ad to be shown, the brand’s ad is not shown even if it was a part of the ad auction.
- Viewability Reports
- Protection against bot traffic (code that generates fraudulent clicks on ads)
How are these tools priced?
These tools are priced very differently based on the scale and volume of the number of impressions they need to execute their tool against to ensure brand safety for organizations. Often, their pricing ends up amounting to more than 5% of your media spend.
Can anyone use these tools?
Yes and No. These tools very often require an advertiser to be using an ad-server and not every advertiser uses an ad server because:
- They are not aware of it, its value and its purpose
- They are not willing to pay an extra amount for ad serving fees
These tools also sometimes require long term contracts to be signed to ensure billing is going to account for all possible levels of customer spend
Is it worth it?
I am not convinced entirely. A lot of tools these days come with their own viewability reports along with site list reports which can address your basic needs. They also come with targeting features that let you mention the specific websites that should run your ads, the specific geographies where you want your ads to run. This combined with their viewability reports ensures that you have a good sense on whether your ads were seen in the right websites.
Ad Verification tools cost money and they require some level of technical expertise. Their value seems to be more defined in giving brand marketers and senior leaders piece of mind in case they are ever asked questions on why the ad came up in a specific place.
Do these tools guarantee brand safety?
No….
Who are some of the big players in this space?
Moat, DoubleVerify are some of the big players in this space.