If defined shortly, brand safety refers to a set of measures applied to ensure the protection of a brand’s reputation in their online advertising practices. However, in practice it’s a far more complex notion to perceive.
In fact, not only it implies avoidance of ad misplacement, e.g. next to vulgar or violent content, but also includes the following key aspects:
Traffic Quality
The quality of traffic on a publisher’s website or mobile app remains one of the key staples, when it comes to brand safety. It needs to be viewable and fraud-free.
Among the effective strategies of one’s brand protection are:
- direct partnership with publishers in the premium segment;
- collaboration with publishers and publishing houses in a more controlled environment (via reputable video ad providers or PMPs);
- enforcement of the implementation of the ads.txt initiative on the publisher side,
- assignment of reputable ad verification tech providers, like DoubleVerify or MOAT, just to name a few, to ensure the maximum quality of served video ad impressions.
Ad Adjacency
Poor ad adjacency goes far beyond video ad placement next to inappropriate content, and may also include coverage of competing brands’ products and services, or delivering video ads in the wrong context, for example.
In this respect, an efficient advertising strategy implies the compilation of detailed adjacency guidelines for publishers and making sure they’re being followed on a consistent basis.
Brand Safety vs Brand Suitability
Unlike the notion of brand safety, suitability rather refers to preferable targeting strategies, specifically developed by marketers to achieve maximum audience engagement with the brand’s ad creatives.
Namely, some of the widely-applied targeting preferences usually cover such parameters, as proper content adjacency (in terms of relevance, language & tone), high video ad viewability (without being intrusive) and audience demographics.
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Read more on how to improve brand safety on the AdPlayer.Pro blog.