The Brand Safety Crisis One Year Later: What’s Working, What’s Not

With thousands of marketing technology solutions, it can be difficult for businesses to develop the right customized marketing technology stack. Phil Schraeder, President and COO of GumGum, talks about why the concept of brand safety is still catching up to marketers. He also highlights aspects related to brand safety and tells us what’s working and what’s not.

Treatment and prevention in the brand safety crisis have made significant strides since it was first declared an epidemic several years ago. Many solutions have entered the marketplace promising various levels of immunity, some with sticking power and effective results, others not so much. And yet there’s still no definitive cure on the horizon as brands continue to find themselves in unfavorable or demeaning digital ad environments featuring hate speech, extreme politics, pornography, vulgar language, fake news, gun violence, violent imagery, and so on.

We’ve all seen it happen, we all know the stories, and each incident sends a chill down the spine of media planners, brand strategists, and corporate executives. Any degree of adjacency to potentially hazardous content can result in a range of sickening side effects, from brand confusion, consumer backlash, loss of revenue, to a chronic case of fully justified digital media anxiety. Just last year, a staggering 70% of brands reported that they had experienced at least one unsafe brand exposure.

The prognosis, however, is gradually improving. But to achieve real and demonstrable results, marketers must be willing to try new solutions and technologies capable of analyzing and interpreting the ominous and complex array of images, video, and brand-unsafe text in the publisher and social realm. Artificial Intelligence-driven tech, geo-targeting, and third-party measurement have all contributed to a stronger defense and an uptick in marketer sentiment that the brand safety crisis is finally showing signs of remission.

Also Read: A Leap Across the Pond: Learnings From the U.K. and U.S. Targeting Mix

What’s Curing Our Brand Safety Ills?

We recently researched the current brand safety zeitgeist among brands, agencies, and publishers, and among many compelling insights, we found that 60% of industry pros still consider brand safety a serious threat to their marketing efforts. This is down from 90% in 2017, but it shows that brand safety is still a widespread industry problem. While the majority of marketers felt that it was primarily the agency’s role to protect the safety of brands, many brands are taking a more proactive and internally strategic role by hiring in-house specialists, with 63% reporting that the implementation of a brand safety officer on their team has affected exposure to unsafe brand experiences.

Additionally, developing more trusting partnerships with publishers has finally come full circle, and human-to-human relationship-building is now considered key in the brand-safety arsenal. Findings indicate that 55% of marketers are connecting with publisher partners to get directly to the root of the problem. Last year, that number was only 39%.

Many respondents also pointed to improved conditions among prominent social media platforms having partnered with third-party measurement solutions to increase ad transparency. As a result, 99% of those queried felt that Facebook and Twitter have markedly improved their brand safety efforts. Twitter, in particularly, more than quadrupled in popularity as one of the most brand-safe social media platforms among competitors.

Could Image Recognition be the Silver Bullet for Brand Safety?

There was definite agreement that choosing the right technology partner to combat safety threats was key to the health and longevity of any brand. In the ongoing debate between blacklists versus whitelists, 62% were in favor blacklisting over 11% of those still using whitelisting. And yet 69% agreed that both of these treatments came with a downside: They can sometimes create restrictive dependencies, the loss of favorable audiences, and less accurate targeting.

Moreover, there was increased favorability for AI-powered solutions, with nearly twice as many marketers employing image recognition and natural language context detection than a year ago due to a higher level of accuracy and reliability when analyzing and identifying brand-unsafe images or a competitor’s presence in perspective ad placements. Using neural networks to screen millions of images for triggers such as nudity, guns, crashes, or any other content deemed unsavory, image recognition technology and natural language processing tools can also recognize brand-favorable content.

Also Read: How Publishers Juggle User Experience and Monetization

Healthy Planning for Lasting Recovery

While brand safety has made formidable year-over-year progress, there is still a hill to climb as marketers and their brand partners continue to vet the tactics and solutions that work best in the battle to defend and protect brands without over-correcting the problem and ending up with side effects that harm positioning or unnecessarily restrict audiences.

Long-term brand recovery relies on choosing the most effective and intuitive technologies that will keep brands safe, building internal teams that can engage in hand-to-hand combat against brand threats, and establishing stronger industry relationships. The age of advertising automation has shown us its flaws, its power, and also an important lesson infallibility that will require both humans and technology, in partnership, to correct.