Brand Safety: What It Means?
Brand safety is all about keeping a brand’s reputation consistent and in line with what the company is trying to represent. Proper brand safety means, for example, avoiding placing ads next to inappropriate content. It can also refer to precautionary measures taken by advertising platforms to ensure a brand’s image, messaging, and integrity is not harmed. It is, in other words, an agreement that the platform will safeguard your ads from being shown alongside inappropriate or competitive:
- Websites
- Videos
- Articles
- Podcasts
- Social media updates
That could potentially damage your reputation, contradict your messaging, or alter the purpose of your advertisement. Although people familiar with digital marketing can tell this is a failing of Google’s AdSense algorithm, but this may not be so black and white for consumers. They would think that you must have paid for such ad placement. Worse still, if your ad were to be featured alongside content containing military conflict, political opinions, illicit drugs, pornography, hate speech, terrorism, and crime.
photo/ Gerd Altmann
Importance of Brand Safety for businesses
Staying up to date with the digital world is already very difficult, but for a business owner, it is important to keep your brand’s as it can greatly increase your brand’s value and your relationship with your buyers. Additionally, through proactive filtering, business owners can avoid interference from bots and other suspicious traffic. Inappropriate content can dramatically hinder the brand reputation in general.
Offensive, Hateful, or inappropriate content placed next to, below, or above an ad can seriously damage the ad’s performance. Consumers will associate the brand with the offensive content. This can hurt not only the performance of the specific ad, but also in the long-term it can damage the business’s overall brand image. This matters because one of the most valuable assets a company has is the image of its brand—and that, of course, is based almost entirely on how the brand is seen through the eyes of the consumer.
Who Is Responsible for Brand Safety?
Brand safety belongs to online marketers who communicate and strategize their brand’s message. A brand itself is responsible for brand safety, which rightfully fits. The brand should take responsibility and control of implementing their message placement. As part of a holistic strategy, brands proactively reach out to users with the appropriate platforms that must be considered. If your brand’s reputation is on the verge of being ruined, you should calmly examine the situation and then think of a way out with your team members.
How to Protect Your Brand?
It is important that you take measures to keep your brand safe as a marketer. Add a brand safety check to your campaign process to ensure online brand protection. Here are some things that you can start doing today to ensure your brand remains safe.
- Define what brand safety means for you
- Prioritize transparency
- Choose a reputable programmatic provider or agency
- Opt for premium inventory
- Avoid blacklisted publishers
- Use insights to monitor campaigns in real-time
- Utilize a campaign’s “negative target” or exclusions
- Look at third party data
Building brand safety into your processes as a marketing team is crucial when advertising online. Although there are numerous risks in running an ad campaign for your brand, the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
Branding holds more power than ever. Appearance and communication of your brand to your target audience goes beyond its content. Where and how you place your ads influences a user impression as well. The quality campaign or content appearance itself is not enough to impress the users anymore. Users nowadays are quick to decide on whether or not they trust a brand based on its ad placement. Companies not only need to focus on powerful branded content but also the avoidance of risked branding.
Author: Jacob Maslow
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