The Worrisome Limitations of Today’s Most Common Brand Safety Approaches
By Teresa Fusaro, Global Product Group Director – Marketing Activation Tech & Digital at Reckitt
These days, post-campaign and in-flight ad verification and brand safety measures aren’t sufficient. As an advertiser, I’m relieved to see our industry moving toward a model that prioritizes campaign setup governance—a process designed to thwart brand-safety and media-waste issues before they occur. That said, we’re still early in this journey.
Bringing transparency to campaign setup has operational implications and requires a disciplined approach, not to mention incentives for internal and external trading teams to put (and keep) a brand’s house in order. The good news is that there are some powerful tools in the market to safeguard media buys. However, many brands are stopping short today when it comes to true protection.
Built-In Platform Capabilities Are Just a Starting Place
The major digital advertising platforms today offer advanced and free-of-charge tools that can be employed to protect brand safety and suitability before campaigns start delivering. The built-in abilities include:
Meta (Facebook, Instagram)
- Placement selection, including the ability to exclude the controversial Audience Network
- Inventory filter settings to select the risk level of content your ads can appear next to
- Block lists and allow lists
- Ability to exclude live streams and publishers outside of monetization programs and stay away from their inherent unpredictability
- Ability to exclude polarizing topics like gaming, politics, etc.
DV360
- Ability to exclude sensitive categories (like sexual content or gambling) and risky content labels (such as mature audiences)
- Publisher and keyword exclusion and inclusion lists
YouTube
- Inventory selection, including the ability to exclude controversial Google Video Partners
- Ability to choose risk level of content your ads will appear next to
- Channel, keyword, topic exclusion and inclusion lists
The Trade Desk
- Various exclusion and inclusion lists
The big advantage of these tools is that they are applied at the campaign setup level. That means, even before the campaigns go live, advertisers can use them to prevent potential damage before it starts.
These tools make brand safety look like an easy battle to win. So, what prevents major global advertisers from using these options? In short: scale. The sheer scale of major global advertisers implies thousands of ads across many platforms, brands, regions, countries, and agencies. Any required manual review is lengthy, hard to coordinate, and prone to delays and human mistakes.
A More Holistic Approach to Campaign Setup Emerges
In an ideal scenario, advertisers would have a more-comprehensive means of ensuring their campaigns are safe at the outset. Brands should begin by defining their media operations best practices and media accountability principles, including a tailored brand suitability framework. They should then have a mechanism—in mutual alignment with internal and external media agencies—to act as a control tower when it comes to monitoring adherence of their media spend to these principles.
The set of rules and best practices should evolve in line with the sophistication of the advertiser, with the starting point being the best practices available by default in the major media platforms. However, once the basic are covered, there are more-advanced and tailored principles that can make a difference in the effectiveness and efficiency of media budget. Examples I have encountered and helped to shape include rules linked to media productivity, data type utilization, quality of creatives, tech connections, and others.
To be effective—as with everything in life—it’s important to anticipate and prevent the issues before they happen. Not long ago, it was very complicated and time-consuming to establish the needed tower control mechanism for advertisers. Fortunately, the industry is evolving fast when it comes to advanced digital media monitoring and governance.
This is where the emerging category of campaign setup governance technology comes into play. Recent technology advances mean marketers can not only act up front to protect their campaigns, but they can also do it at scale across platforms. This new category of solutions is best represented by industry pioneers like Adfidence and the many in-house solutions being developed by advertisers and media agencies for their own purposes.
Once campaign setup governance solutions are put in place, advertisers can see how all their campaigns across the world adhere to best practices, standard and tailored, regardless of their numbers and complexity. Any mistakes or lack of adherence to company-wide standards are easy to spot. Daily checks mean you can track progress and typically get to full compliance within days or weeks of deploying the technology.
Media governance tools can provide a consistent view into media operations, even for large and complex companies, to ensure built-in platform tools are employed to their maximum effect. They offer a common window across markets and brands and provide visibility to media departments on how media agencies are using digital media tools and applying best practices.
Media governance tools are an important enabler in a larger industry revolution. Instead of being seen as a control mechanism for teams that run campaigns, campaign setup governance solutions should enable conversations with media agencies about the quality of media investments, helping to create a more constructive and transparent partnership—and, overall, a better and healthier advertising industry.