You generated your programmatic advertising report for your line of children’s toys, which includes a list of the top sites that your display ads are showing. At the top of the list, an adult website lists as one of the top sites for impressions. Fearing someone screen shooting this and posting it all over social media, you quickly put that website on your exclude list, but who is to say it won’t happen again? If you’re someone who places ads, either for your company or for your clients, you are always running into this situation.

That’s why it’s essential to practice brand safety. It keeps your brand from falling victim to bad press or image from accidentally being associated with a site or organization that doesn’t fit your brand image.

The Three Pillars of Brand Safety

There are three essential pillars holding up a brand’s reputation — contextual safety, technical safety, and brand image safety. The scenario above hit all three. Let’s dive into what each one means for your brand.

Brand Image Safety

Your brand’s reputation and organizational morality is your life raft. If you get a bad news story or trending negative post on Twitter, it can easily mean a sinking ship for you (as a media manager) and your brand. Anytime the company looks to be wavering away from its message, it may upset not only the customers but also investors who are looking for strong leadership.

To put all of the efforts, resources, and time into crafting a perfect message only for it to be delivered in a completely wrong location or have the wrong effect is the antithesis of progress.

Within advertising, ensuring that your messages fall on the right audience is paramount. With the current advancements of Ad tech, AI-based targeting, with correct technical setup, ensures that your advertising aligns with the content.

Technical Safety

There’s a whole gamut of technical issues and compliance regulations if you’re operating a business online. You have to have a privacy policy, terms and conditions, and the setup behind the scenes to make all of your advertising happen.

In the last few years, we’ve gone through changes with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in the EU and cookie-compliance. Third-party cookies are falling away, and the GDPR and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) were only the first steps. This move will make it harder to advertise the traditional way. Being out of compliance can also cost you actual real-life fines from compliance and regulatory bodies.

Recently, Facebook launched its version of CCPA and GDPR compliance — LDU (Limited Data Use), which detects and protects users within these boundaries. Facebook is not out of hot-water yet, because of their data privacy scandal — causing government agencies and big corporations alike to pull out of Facebook advertising.

We’ll be diving deeper into technical solutions and practices in the coming weeks to help your brand keep abreast of the technical space.

Contextual Safety

As ad tech has gotten better, wild instances such as a children’s brand appearing on adult sites have significantly reduced. But does an advertiser want to show up on a page or a video that has nothing to do with what the viewers are watching? Think about it. If you were watching a video about cats, what is the likelihood that at that moment, you were interested in finding car insurance? Not only are you angry that the video was interrupted by content that you didn’t ask for and are not interested in, but the advertiser had to pay for you to be upset and angry with this.

You could take all of the time to blacklist or whitelist certain publishers or websites so that your programmatic campaign runs smoothly. You can also adopt a different method for serving advertising with a focus on the content with which your ad is being served; contextual-based video advertising. This Contextual ad-serving ensures that your ads are relevant, timely, non-interruptive, and gives you more potential to serve.

Follow Us as We Explore Each of These

Check out the rest of our blogs where we outline actionable steps for each pillar with examples and research to help ensure your brand stays safe. With CatapultX, you can advertise now while keeping your brand safe. Reach out to us today to schedule a personal demo of how this could strengthen your brand.

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Founded in 2019, CatapultX is an AI-based platform at the forefront of innovative video marketing. Serving contextually relevant video ads that don’t interfere with consumer experience, CatapultX brings a profitable, engaging and enjoyable experience to publishers, advertisers and audiences. If you are interested in expanding the profitability of your content or building a more robust advertising portfolio, reach out to us at info@catapultx.com or set up a meeting with someone from our sales team.

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