Contextual Brand Safety
Why brands are scared to advertise on your platform in 2020…
In 2020, we already know that ads are supposed to be contextually relevant. Long gone are the days where ads simply needed to target the right audience — regardless of time/location. With ever-decreasing conversion rates, we now realize that ads need to target the right audience, at the right moment.
With the increased social awareness of Gen Z, brands now also care about the connotations that are being implicitly associated with them while advertising with your platform. More specifically, brands care about the content your users are viewing before, during, and after their ad is seen.
“Brand safety is a set of measures that aim to protect the image and reputation of brands from the negative or damaging influence of questionable or inappropriate content when advertising online.” — Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB)
If you think brands don’t care about brand safety, just look at the immediate action that KFC took after facing a large backlash in the UK for a “finger-licking good” ad during COVID
Even YouTube is dealing with this issue. Brands have been complaining a lot more in 2020 due to their YouTube ads being shown during extremist videos (e.g. political, racial, etc.). However, because YouTube is owned by Google, YouTube can get away with it — your platform can’t.
Advertisers pulled their ads from YouTube — literally the largest streaming site — for months, due to YouTube showing their ads next to non-brand-safe content. YouTube lost hundreds of millions of dollars due to that small protest. How does your platform adapt? What would brands do if your platform ends up in a brand safety incident?
If you’re looking for articles on how to actually achieve brand safety, check out these two articles:
- Simplified Contextual Video Ads Technical Paper: https://medium.com/this-week-in-adtech/simplified-technical-paper-ml-based-contextual-video-ads-on-demand-live-ee8f9b661059
- Simplified ML-powered Brand Safety Technical Paper: https://medium.com/this-week-in-adtech/using-computer-vision-nlp-for-brand-safety-9872a93000c8
Brand safety isn’t vertical or platform-specific. Brand safety affects online news publications, music streaming, video streaming, and even podcasts (now that podcasts are mainstream).
Brands care about the genre of your visual, musical, and/or written content. They care about if the content features explicit language (i.e. swearing), hate speech, as well as if the scenes, writing, or lyrics before and after the ad create negative emotions for the user.
In a large study by Cheq AI, results indicated that intent to buy dropped by 200% after watching inappropriate content, as well as the brand quality is perceived 7 times worst. Additionally, consumers were 450% more likely to feel that the brand did not care about them.
After Cheq AI’s study, there have been a plethora of other studies showing the dramatic effects of context as it relates to brand safety — and brands are starting to realize this too. From Pepsi to L’Oreal, 2019/2020 has been a wake-up call in the marketing world. Topics, words, and phrases that used to be brand-safe can instantly change due to new current events — and brands expect advertising platforms to be able to instantaneously adapt or be left behind.
