The Importance of Brand Safety in Digital Advertising |   10 Jun, 2022

After COVID-19, the usage of digital platforms has experienced a major jump. Not letting this opportunity go to waste, brands made good use of it to spread awareness about their products as much as they could.

However, as there are no roses without any thorns, there have been many events and controversies making their way into the digital sphere too. This has made brands more aware of the importance of brand safety in digital advertising. 

Even after spending millions of dollars on advertising, mixing fake news with genuine digital advertising is not what any brand would desire

For example, a bottled water company like Danone, Bisleri, or Nestle wouldn’t want their ads to be played on an article talking about plastic water bottles polluting the ocean.

When it comes to sites like YouTube, advertisers have little control or knowledge about where their ads are being played. 

Therefore, it is highly critical for advertisers and publishers to educate themselves on brand safety issues.

What do you Understand by Brand Safety?

Brand safety is the technique of preserving a brand’s reputation and preventing it from appearing in highly dangerous circumstances like hate speech, terrorism, illegal drugs, piracy, obscenity, death/injury, etc. 

The basic purpose of brand safety in online advertising is to associate the brand with good, authoritative, and non-confrontational content. To eliminate unwanted or incorrect brand connections, primitive tactics such as term banning and URL blocklisting were utilized to achieve success in this attempt. 

Why Brand Safety in Digital Advertising is Important?

Many people believe that advertising is separate and apart from the content of the page where it appears. However, this is not the case!

Consumers connect brands with the content around which they are displayed and as an implicit endorsement of such content. A bad implicit endorsement might have long-term consequences for the safety of the brand.

Following are some of the reasons why brand safety is vital in digital advertising:

1. Maintaining a Good Reputation of the Brand

This is essential to the company’s success and prosperity. When advertisements appear alongside real content, consumers are more inclined to interact with the brand.

Consumers also believe that it is the brand’s responsibility to place itself among the top-quality content.

According to a survey, the majority of polled customers claimed they would quit using a brand if it showed next to fake news or objectionable content. 

2. Affecting the Performance of Digital Marketing Campaigns

Furthermore, associations, whether favorable or bad, have a direct influence on the efficacy of your digital marketing activities. Using a brand safety provider gives consumers the image of quality and dependability, which leads to greater real interest.

3. First Impression is the Most Lasting Impression

While a well-established brand may not incur significant ad revenue losses from a single occurrence, a smaller business requires reputable sources to create credibility.

Brand safety in digital advertising should not be underestimated. It has an impact on the brand’s reputation and, as a result, ad income and sales.

Who Decides What is “Safe” or “Unsafe”?

There are many organizations that are striving to define brand safety procedures. Among them are the most popular organizations, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and the Media Rating Council (MRC).

These trade groups, in collaboration with brand safety vendors, set guidelines and best practices for publishers, advertisers, and agencies to follow to maintain a healthy supply chain, and thus protect them from placing their ads on any content that is not safe. 

They provide the foundations to guarantee that the publisher’s inventory is accessible, complies with privacy standards, and follows brand safe advertising best practices for placement. Similarly, advertisers have brand authenticity and restricted material for ad standards.

Ensuring 360 Degree Brand Safety in Advertising with Mirrors by Silverpush

Mirrors by Silverpush keeps brand safety as the top priority and through its AI-powered in-video key context solution delivers brand safety controls without killing your reach, tackles the problems of over-blocking, and provides online brand safety for advertisers.

The deeply trained proprietary AI models identify custom-defined unsafe contexts like celebrities, actions, objects, and scenes in a streaming video. These videos are classified into many levels of video content, including smoking, adult, violence, wrecks, arms, terrorism, and others.

Along with this, it also focuses on brand suitability through text & sentiment analysis, engagement metrics, and organic influence at the video level.