How advertisers’ fears over brand safety could be a boon for traditional publishers
Shortly after Donald Trump won the US election, an anonymous Twitter profile entitled Sleeping Giants appeared online encouraging ordinary people to call out companies that advertised on aggressive right-wing websites.
The theory was that those businesses were funding “fake news” that some say led to the Republican win. All users had to do, the account explained, was take a screenshot of the ad, tweet the business “politely” asking them to remove it and then let @slpng_giants know when the brand responded. Its first target was a student loan company in San Francisco that popped up on alt-right publisher Breitbart, but today 3,800 businesses have complied with requests to remove ads, including Audi, BMW, Visa and – incredibly, as of last month – even Mumbrella.
UH OH!!! @mumbrella + @Mumbrellanews your ads are on Alt Right hate site Breitbart ☹️
Please dont fund hate speech with your ad $$s Please Block Breitbart from your ad buy@slpng_giants_oz @slpng_giants pic.twitter.com/6ZHVfkPAvt
— Slow Burn (@SlowBurnOz) April 26, 2018
Crucially, what separates Sleeping Giants from similar campaigns is its understanding of the intricacies of how the ad game works. An FAQ on its site explains none of the advertisers had likely chosen to fund these publishers but were doing so because they marketed programmatically. Or in other words, they chose to spend their ad dollars chasing users rather than buying individual websites, meaning their creative could theoretically appear on one of millions of locations.
“Everyone can spray their ads all over the place now,” the anonymous member of Sleeping Giants said when interviewed by US news site Mother Jones. “It’s like the Wild West.” To boycott a company, the person continued, would be unfair because brands probably have no idea as to what’s going on.
THE SG UPDATED CONFIRMED LIST: https://t.co/4TYRUOj9sv
THE SG FAQ: https://t.co/wfSUQBjOgj
REMOVE ADS YOURSELF: https://t.co/V4V8qWyyv3 pic.twitter.com/JszlNFryKY— Sleeping Giants (@slpng_giants) December 16, 2016
James Diamond, the managing director of brand safety software company IAS, thinks the Sleeping Giants controversy is an excellent case study in how consumer mentality is changing. Whereas before the average person just saw an advert sat adjacent to editorial content, now some consider that brand to be actively endorsing the article. “Some consumers are now connecting brands with the content they serve against and that is creating additional complexities that marketers need to account for in their planning,” he says.
And it’s a similar situation with social media. If a user is generating his own words and pictures, with no editorial oversight, then it’s an almost impossible feat to stop an advert appearing next to something that won’t offend someone. Toby Dewar, head of media and management at Westpac, is concerned about the issue of brand safety. “We can’t afford to stay in bad environments,” he says. “There’s an argument that publishers claim to be 99.9% safe, but the equation is simple: if a brand buys 10m impressions, 10,000 could be in an unsafe environment. The reality is one single bad impression has the potential to impact our brand, hence why it is such a focus for Westpac.”
Just how big an issue is all this? IAS’s latest research reveals that threats to businesses in Australia increased from 7.2% to 8.8% in the second half of 2017 compared to the first six months. Those numbers equate to millions of dollar of advertising that could potentially damage those paying for it. No wonder the Bank of America has become the first major company in the world to appoint a specialist brand safety officer. “But programmatic isn’t the problem itself,” argues Diamond. “It’s just a tool and it’s how you use it that matters. It’s smart for brands to leverage data and target their ads to users, but they must remember to protect their brand because it’s their most valuable asset.”
The upshot of all of this is that brand safety has the potential to hand a powerful advantage to traditional publishers, many of whom have had their revenues gobbled up by Google, Facebook and a host of similar rivals. Those tech giants took a big slice of publishers’ revenue because they claimed their adverts were more effective. But now they’re struggling to control their assets, the editorially created world of newspapers and magazines looks more attractive again. It’s come at a fortuitous time when online newspapers are seeing increases in their audience.
The problem is that old-fashioned media owners can be hurt by bad ad placement, too. Sure, they are less likely to publish a racist or homophobic article, say, but what supermarket wants to be next to an article on food poisoning? Or what action movie trailer wants to sit adjacent to a feature about a grisly local murder? The alternative would be not running problematic stories in the first place, but not even the biggest brands want that. “Advertisers need to get out of the way of what publishers publish,” says Westpac’s Dewar. “What we need are the tools that enable us to choose what content we want to be adjacent to, to protect or promote our brands.”
IAS’ MD James Diamond
Those tools are the type created by companies such as IAS. Its tech, for instance, can analyse an article’s risk across many different categories and more than 40 languages, while also taking into account location and keywords. The process starts by identifying which content is incompatible with which advert (something that changes on a campaign-by-campaign basis) and then categorising the publisher’s content to make sure risks are averted.
“We can look for signals such as content, words, metadata or even the way pages link together,” explains Diamond. “We rate a page for its prevalence for alcohol, but we never decide if a page is simply good or bad because every brand has a different perception of what is brand safe for them. The businesses draw the lines in the sand.”
The tech also gives publishers a second advantage to go alongside brand safety by identifying an ad’s slot viewability – that is, how many people see it. It sounds mad, but for a long time less scrupulous publishers’ tactics were to generate additional revenue by adding more and more inventory. In fact, even reputable publishers have shifted their focus. Mumbrella has reported how both News and Fairfax have been open about moving towards providing less, but better-quality, ad slots.
IAS’ research on this is more positive than on brand safety, with online advertising’s viewability increasing from 52.6% in the first half of 2017 to 57.2% in the second. You only have to look at the smart, spacious websites of Australia’s biggest mastheads to see why this country is helping lead the world on this issue. “Every campaign needs to be trackable,” explains Dewar. “We’re shifting towards publishers that let us track viewability and manage brand safety.”
What’s happening now, then, is that publishers are using measurement tools to find out which of their ad slots are having an impact, and which aren’t. This lets them jettison the bad ones to focus on providing less, but better inventory. For maybe the first time since the dawn of the modern internet, ad inventory is being capped by measurement and standards for brand safety and viewability. Or in other words – the age-old mechanism of supply and demand is starting to come back into play. “And with these mechanisms in place, we’ll pay more for quality,” adds Dewar.
But there’s another revolution brewing. Rather than quibble about impressions, what if publishers were able to know exactly how much exposure time each individual advert is actually receiving? If that could happen, then the whole industry would shift to buying exposure time, not impressions, just like how television works.
“Trading on time and viewability will benefit premium publishers,” explains Diamond. “Because what advertisers really want is for their ads to be seen for longer periods of time – and what drives up this exposure time is time spent on page, which is directly linked to engaging content. Premium publishers have this in spades.
“In a way, we’ve gone full circle.”
CONTENT SPONSORED BY IAS
