The unprecedented reach of digital advertising inevitably brings higher risk, so fine-tuned brand protection is an essential tool in every marketer’s arsenal. It’s the marketer’s job to protect their brands from associations that could be damaging to them.

Context is crucial where brand protection is concerned but how you define unsafe inventory depends on your audience and the products you market. For instance, an auto marketer never wants to see her ads next to a story about a car safety recall. Global brands are also faced with the challenge of creating campaigns which navigate the complex nuances of culture and language, and translate positively across the entire web.

The right brand protection strategy will keep your ads from being displayed alongside the wrong content – without diminishing the reach of your campaign or killing your KPIs. Here are the key steps to protect your brand in today’s fast-paced digital advertising environment:

1. Question your tolerance

One brand’s content minefield is another’s top-performing placement. The first step in defining your brand protection strategy is to determine how much risk is appropriate for your campaign.

2. Know your limits

Work with contextual data providers to screen and filter ad inventory based on appropriate parameters for your brand. There are two ways to do this: pre-bid screening and post-big screening.

Pre-bid screening allows you to screen by URL or site section. It can be less precise as it doesn’t reveal the content of a page, and it won’t allow you to serve ads on unclassifiable inventory, which can’t be measured.

An alternative is post-bid screening which verifies specific contextual safety after you’ve won – and paid for – a bid. The downside? It can mean buying placements you don’t actually use.

3. Mark your black list

Develop a black list and/or white list, defining URLs to exclude or include in your campaign. A black list of sites you wish to avoid might include your competitors’ websites and apps, publishers whose views don’t sync with your brand, or sites that don’t meet your publishing or editorial standards. A white list, on the other hand, includes a handpicked list of the only URLs where you want to advertise. Do bear in mind though that white lists afford control but limit reach. They are typically used only by the most risk-averse advertisers.

4. Put it to the test

Once you’ve launched your campaign, test your brand safety solution to ensure it is delivering results. Not seeing the numbers you want? Maybe your black list is too long. Or you might want to consider shifting your screening from pre-bid to post-bid. You’ve got a whole host of controls at your disposal – don’t hesitate to tweak and refine to find the right balance of brand-safety risk and reward.

Although it only takes one ad displayed on one inappropriate page to cause problems for a brand, the vast majority of digital advertising inventory is safe for most businesses. There is scaremongering around brand protection and 33% of advertisers recently told the IAB that brand safety was preventing them from taking programmatic more seriously. The aim of programmatic is for brands to reach the right audience, at the right time within milliseconds based on millions of data insights – it should make protecting your brand easier. The IAB findings suggest that controlling your brand’s reputation online is difficult, but calculated campaigns based on data insights can help to solve this problem. By using data to set parameters and refine the rules for your brand, you can ensure your brand’s safety.

For more information and guidance, refer to the eBook here.

 

By Pierre Naggar, Managing Director EMEA of Turn. 

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