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The COVID-19 outbreak has caused significant changes in the way businesses identify themselves with different types of content. There is a drastic shift, or I might say, an increase in the number of users who consume information through online means. People are hooked on social media and websites for updates, resulting in more screen time. Brands are thus focused on establishing their online presence. However, the internet is also a haven for dangerous content, with fake news, unsuitable content, conspiracy theories, and other stuff blooming everywhere. As a result, they put a lot of emphasis on brand safety. Brand Safety solutions are intended to safeguard a brand's online reputation by prohibiting it from associating with harmful or inappropriate content.
What is Brand Safety?
Brand Safety is the measures taken by a brand to prevent itself from appearing next to questionable content online and safeguarding its reputation. With the present state of digital marketing, businesses are aggressively running adverts on prominent websites and social media platforms. Sites with more audiences or visitors will result in brand promotion. But that does not necessarily mean that businesses should blindly go after numbers. It would require appropriate measures to ensure that the brand uses the right step to protect itself from digital ad frauds.
In this blog we will discuss brand safety solutions or measures to safeguard your business. But first, we need to understand why brand safety is important.
The importance of Brand Safety in the digital world
Brand safety ensures a customer's trust in a brand. Revenue, brand equity, and consumer impressions will suffer when there is no trust. As a result, Brand Safety will always be critical for marketers and enterprises. Customers may be alienated and lost as a result of poor brand alignment. Customers may now share positive and negative experiences with more people than ever before because of the advent of digital platforms. As a result, brands must resolve concerns quickly or risk losing customers and money.
Brand suitability is the approach adopted by brands to find the right balance of reach and protection for their specific needs. Advertisers must understand that the brand safety strategy used for their digital advertising initiatives works at the speed of culture, and can also create new problems as they emerge. Moreover, Brand safety measures are subjective, and it will depend on what is appropriate for the brand. One strategy might work for you but not necessarily for others.
For instance, a car manufacturer would not want to place an advertisement right next to a report on a car accident. However, an insurance company will be interested in ad positioning there.
Brand Safety Solutions
Keyword blacklisting: It is a strategy wherein the advertisers will suspend the bid if the content page contains dangerous keywords. This has been a very common route for advertisers, but it frequently results in income loss for publishers. Publishers want to be truthful, and marketers want to safeguard their brands. However, more advanced blacklisting of keywords that do not comprehend the context and simply block brands from appearing on websites would cost both advertisers and publishers in the long term.
In addition to keyword blacklisting, marketers can also run Site Inspections. This includes an assessment of the website's domain authority, viewability score, fill rate, and historical bid price. The sites that meet the advertiser's expectations in terms of brand placement can help them appear next to the right content with assurance. Moreover, it is advised to keep a watch on these figures in order to prevent being penalised by brand safety authorities.
Furthermore, to avoid the complexities of programmatic deals, advertisers opt for a safer option: Direct Transactions. This benefits publishers because direct deals can generate a higher revenue than programmatic auctions for the same amount of impressions.
The evolution of Brand Safety and why it is becoming more difficult?
While guaranteeing brand safety was once as simple as ensuring your business's ad appeared on the appropriate TV show, the shift to online and the saturation of content has made it more difficult than ever for brands. COVID has generated new hurdles for brand safety by dominating the content consumption cycle. More and more users and targeted audiences are now consuming information via online channels. Thus it now requires more attention towards surfacing authoritative and relevant content and providing critical placement for it, banning fraudulent publishers, and collaborating with partners who assure safety.
It is vital today to go beyond brand safety. A good brand suitability strategy to ensure that your brand is aligned with positive settings while avoiding damaging content. However, Keyword blacklisting and URL blocking, which are the most widely used brand safety methods, do not assist in every condition.
Many brand safety errors or blunders can be traced back to strategies that haven't been updated to reflect today's content and news cycles. Context is important in determining the underlying meaning of a page and accounting for subtleties in language and interpretation.
Professional assistance for Brand Safety Companies
Com Olho’s Brand Safety APIs prevent your advertising from being displayed on irrelevant and hazardous websites and mobile applications in real-time. It not only allows your company to show adverts to humans, but it also protects your brand equity. Because digital ads are likely to be seen by more humans, every proactive effort taken to limit the impact of ads being shown in irrelevant and non-human ad slots will multiply your ROAS. The patented technology helps in the assessment of campaigns’ several points, which include ownership, content kind, reviews, engagement, and other factors. After retrieving the data, the platform automatically divides it into categories, ranging from the worst to the best publishers.
In Conclusion
It is crucial to note that publishers are brands too, are connected with damaging content and can have serious reputational and financial damages. When a platform is accused of displaying harmful content, both the publisher and advertisers suffer. Advertisers are more aware of the benefits of having control over where their brand is placed. Advertisers will constantly strive to have their brand featured on content that reflects their values and messaging. And thus it is important to adopt a policy that maximises brand safety while minimising risk, especially in this fast-changing digital landscape.