Are brands asking the question?

Julia Smith, head of IASH, the Internet Advertising Sales House Council, on whether brands are taking enough care to stay safe online.

We know that clients ask a lot of questions, as they should;  “are you giving me value for money?” “what’s my ROI?” “can you turn this direct response display ad around in a week?”, and the now infamous “how can we make this go viral?” Whether the budget is big or small, marketers have a right to ask as many questions as they can about their campaigns, to reassure the big cheeses and remain confident that their target audience is being reached in the right way at the right time.

But I wonder how many clients ask the question “am I safe?” Perhaps that seems like a strange preoccupation to have in this day and age when markets are mature and advertising is one of the most advanced, revolutionary industries on the planet. But the concept of brand safety is creeping up the agenda, as advertisers and agencies realise that serious steps need to be taken in order to protect their brands, particularly online.

Media planning and buying is now, of course, a far more complex beast.  Gone are the days when you had a tried and tested broadcast/print/outdoor formula that guaranteed sufficient reach within channels as overwhelmingly reliable as a pair of old slippers. But the times they have a-changed, and with the growth of digital came an increase in new, dynamic, often user-generated content both on and offline. As engaging and fresh as this content is, it may not always be the best place for a brand to find themselves. On the other hand, for younger, riskier ad campaigns, this could be the perfect place, but it’s a dilemma that needs to be acknowledged.

In fact, at the IAB Engage conference late last year, AOL’s president of global advertising and strategy Jeff Levick highlighted the need for brands to be much more aware of where their ads are going, and the impact of being sat next to inappropriate content. He said that with the rise and rise of reality television, advertisers now can’t be so sure they’re placed within the most relevant media surroundings. He said that “marketers are steadily running out of places to control their brand”, and referenced a quote from a senior marketer at P&G, who had told him that more than “60% of network programming will be reality television and I can’t put my brand there”.

Which presents exceptional opportunities for the digital industry. Behind the scenes for some years now we’ve been taking great strides in ensuring that brands no longer see the internet as a veritable ‘wild west’, or a vast incomprehensible space unfettered by moral codes.  And that’s where IASH – the Internet Advertising Sales House Council – has stepped in, to ensure that advertisers and agencies have no uncertainty about how safe their ads are online.

Ad networks can help you go beyond the major portals to amass extensive reach and hit the longtail of (sometimes very niche) websites where response can be far greater with a more captive audience, but there need to be processes in place to ensure that brands are safe within these spaces.   IASH classifications allow brands to pick and choose where their campaigns go.  ‘Standard’ inventory, for example, is the part of a site which has restricted content that you would find on a web 1.0 site or an ecommerce property such as Argos. Whereas agencies are also able to opt for a number of other classifications for better reach, that places ads within different types of content to differing levels of consumer participation – brands that like to position themselves amongst user-generated content are able to do so, whilst being made fully aware of the risks.

As the industry matures, there are now far greater calls for transparency in terms of buying and selling advertising through networks, and this is why IASH members adhere to a strict code of conduct – audited by ABCe – to take away the fear of the relative online unknown.

But whilst best practice guidelines can be put into place and codes of conduct launched to police the activities of organisations online, as an industry we should always strive to achieve ‘100% safe’.  As technology develops, so too should our business models and our methods of reassuring advertisers that their ads are in safe hands.

For example, in the future we’re likely to see significant growth of real-time services which monitor where ads are appearing next to content (based on keywords) to further reduce the risk of inappropriate placement.  We’ve all been sent by our friends the screen grabs where ads for airlines appear next to news stories about plane crashes, and marketing messages for junk food are positioned on discussion threads dedicated to obesity. Such real-time ‘content safe’ services will greatly reduce these risks, and serve to reinforce the integrity of our medium even further.

So brands have a responsibility to ask their agencies “am I safe?” They need to be confident that their ads are not just getting to the right people and evoking the right response, but they’re not surrounded by inappropriate content that could damage their reputation. They should be asking the question, and then letting the experts do the rest, because brand safety is incredibly easy to achieve, but if lost can prove incredibly difficult to retrieve.