What does brand safety mean to you?

Marketing & Advertising has always been a field of jargon's and methodologies, it has been a market selected by a few and for long it has been able to keep it's dark secrets. As we have been moving towards a more digital world, the need for brand safety, trust, transparency and privacy are among the most discussed keywords among marketplaces that crowds marketers.

We have tried summing the context of Brand Safety in today's digital world.

1. Ads served on unsafe environments

An OTA (Online Travel Agency) player would never want a digital advertisement next to news page that's describing a recent travel accident or mishap or say an e-commerce player or any player would never want a digital advertisement next to page that describes a sensitive issue. These form of ad view-ability on unsafe environment doesn't just bring down the brand image as a whole, but also reflects upon lack of attention of marketers in house. We need to enable our programmatic technology to be able to predict ad placement by merely processing keywords on the page during ad placement, and prevent it from being served on unsafe environments.

2. Transparency of Supply Chain

We have noticed an upward demand of marketers to be able look into their entire supply chain of channels their creatives run on, except the walled gardens such as Google and Facebook, marketers leverage on ad networks/agencies to exponentially scale their traffic, but often forget that non transparent supply chains target particular GAID's/IDFA of brand's consumers for their competitors.

3. Behaviour Bot Traffic and Trust

One of the key reasons for lack of transparency in supply chains is interest of ad agencies to intentionally add bot traffic for financial gains. While traffic mixes have been a new age methodology for cyber criminals to minimise detection, unethical technology development to fudge the data with intermediary 3rd party tools and technologies.

4. Privacy, the new Law

While the ad serving infrastructure is ready and deployed, and ad tech market is highly inflated and looms in darkness. A ever increasing demand of consumers demand has been constantly questioning the practices and ethics the market has been using for years. Today, consumers don't want to be tracked, they don't want to see ad's that are targeting on basis of their searches and research.

While we are slowing improving the marketing and advertisement industry as a whole, bringing back the attention to the consumer needs and adding more value to the advertiser spends. The age of software infrastructure is over, marketers ain't looking for DMP's / DSP's /SSP's that can automate their workflows but they are constantly in search of algorithms and cognitive technology that can help them make more sense of their data assets.

“People are spending too much time talking about ad-blocking and not enough time figuring out why people want to block ads.” Jim Stengel, former P&G CMO