Digital Advertisers Focusing on Brand Safety
The landscape of digital advertising is massively changing. The industry is being held to a higher standard as important advertising figures like P&G’s Marc Pritchard call attention to the poor quality of the environment. The advertising giant is taking an active role in ensuring the importance of brand safety and reevaluating the worth of investing in digital advertising.
This is all part of the process of the internet and its services maturing. The digital ad space is now mainstream and it needs to take the appropriate measures to assure advertisers that they can truly trust the content and the context of where their ads appear.
For most of the digital ad space’s history, advertisers didn’t notice when their ads appeared next to inappropriate content, but that is changing and they now care more than ever where their brand is featured.
“We cut more than $100 million in wasteful spending starting last March because we couldn’t be assured ads would not appear next to bad content like a terrorist video.”
- Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer at P&G, 2017 ANA Masters of Marketing Conference
Outside of the extreme cases with horrific videos and similarly distasteful content, it can be hard to determine what exactly is safe. A neutral news report on a recent airplane crash is not obviously inappropriate, but it would not be brand safe for an airline company.
In order to ease the process and help brands decide what is brand safe, there are a few guidelines emerging in the industry, like those developed by Gameloft Advertising Solutions:
- Premium Content
- Precise Targeting
- Transparent Reporting
These guidelines go a long way in creating a safe environment. Premium content and precise targeting assure brands that they can trust the ad space and transparent reporting provides the proof.
There is still a lot of work to be done, but all major tech companies are moving towards making their content as brand safe as possible. A very visible example is YouTube completely changing its Preferred Partner Program in order to assure that the content on their platform conforms to a much stricter content policy.
As the internet becomes more involved in the daily lives of the public at large, this awkward phase is natural. The Wild West days may be over but the creative spark of the digital ad space is as alive as ever.
There’s room to have the digital ad space be about new ideas that can work with advertisers rather than against them. All that is changing is allowing advertisers to combine the newest technologies with a brand safe environment.
Guest post by Casey Campbell, Senior Director of Advertising at Gameloft North America. Originally posted on his LinkedIn.
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