Digital is often referred to as the wild west of advertising, filled with both harmful and high-quality inventory for ad placements.
In this untamed landscape, advertisers strive to reach their audience at scale while avoiding environments that could be damaging to their brand.
Prioritising brand safety is important, as over 50 per cent of consumers have expressed they are likely to stop using a product or service if its ad appears near inappropriate content. But keeping the balance between avoiding certain topics and maintaining scale is a challenging task.
How can you ensure brand safety while effectively reaching your audience, and how can contextual AI help achieve this?
Brand suitability: going beyond brand safety
Brand safety refers to the safety measures and practices taken by advertisers to avoid any placement or context that could potentially harm their brand’s reputation and ensure ads are displayed in appropriate and suitable environments.
For instance, most brands would consider harmful, offensive, or controversial content inappropriate to associate with. While this is true, brand safety encompasses much more than just these obvious exclusions.
Think of a fitness brand and a children’s toy brand, and let’s say there’s an article featuring a weight loss diet. While this article could be brand safe and relevant for the fitness brand, the opposite can be said for the children’s toy brand. And this is what brand suitability is all about.
Brand suitability acknowledges that each brand has its own contents and contexts where its ads are most appropriate online. It’s about much more than avoiding ad placements alongside obviously inappropriate content – it’s about finding the right environments that work for your specific brand. What is the most effective way to achieve this?
Establishing brand safety with contextual advertising
While some companies use keyword block lists to filter out terms deemed unsafe for their brand, contextual AI goes far beyond this initial filtering process.
Leveraging natural language processing, deep learning, and computer vision, it understands the nuances of language and semantically interprets editorial content to identify what is suitable and safe for each unique brand.
With its human-like understanding of the context of the content, contextual AI defines the different meanings words can have based on how, when, and where they are used.
For example, the word “kill” might initially be associated with non-brand-safe, negative content. However, in the phrase “kill the competition,” it takes on a different, more positive meaning.
Similarly, “Corona” can refer to either the beer brand or the COVID-19 virus, depending on the context. Understanding these nuances of language and semantic differences is what makes contextual AI a powerful tool for achieving brand safety while effectively reaching your target audience at scale.
In their report on brand safety and suitability, the IAB highlighted the importance for advertisers to not solely rely on keyword block lists, as doing so could result in missed opportunities and negative brand implications. Instead, they recommend brands adopt a contextual strategy that goes beyond URL analysis to determine the actual topic and discussion on a page.
Prioritising brand safety is critical for advertisers to safeguard their image and reputation, attract customers, and maintain trust. Implementing brand safety measures through contextual AI gives brands more control over where their ads appear, alleviating the risk of inappropriate ad placement and ensuring campaigns align with values, objectives, and overall brand identity.
By Sherry Mansour, Managing Director at Seedtag MENA
