Brand safety promises from the ‘premium’ publishers need to be challenged
Premium publishers continue to insist they provide ultimate brand safety, while in reality, ads for baby skincare play before brutal footage of dictators being beaten to death, reveals Nic Halley.
The publishing giants in digital media would have you believe that bigger is better when it comes to guaranteeing brand safety online. In the immortal words of Flavor Flav: “don’t believe the hype”. No one’s internet is more reliable than anyone else’s. Publications can’t assure brand safety, only you can.
Last week I attended a Mumbrella360 session where a News Corp representative asserted that you could only trust a ‘premium publisher’ when it comes to guaranteeing brand safety online. Hypocritical I thought, given that a lot of what was being defined as ‘not brand safe’ was home page content on News.com.au or Daily Telegraph on any given day.
Case-in-point, I decided to conduct a quick experiment and took some snapshots of News Corp’s home page content. Along with the relentless ‘wardrobe malfunctions’ and basic nudity pieces, was the horrific footage of Muammar Gaddafi being beaten to death sat alongside an Aveena Baby pre-roll, and a particularly creepy piece about how ‘former’ child star Dakota Fanning now looks in a bikini. These were just a snapshot of what I observed, and I wonder how ‘safe’ these brands would feel about their placements?
“Follow those who are seeking the truth and mistrust those who claim to have found it.” Well said… just not sure what a selfie has to do with brand safety.
Does anyone sit and wonder what the hell the ad networks were selling all those years ago before viewability and brand safety were things being discussed?
They wouldn’t share a single insight back to you, let alone a url report. God knows what was being flogged to unsuspecting agencies.
Now we have an endless amount of tools to ensure transparency, brand safety etc.
This conversation needs to stop by the end of the year, there is no excuse for an advertiser not taking charge, putting the agency or publisher on notice that it is priority #1, implement some tools and get on with the job.
And advertisers… Stop chasing the lowest cpm possible.
That is part of the problem as well.
Does anyone have any data at all to address the notion that ad placement alongside graphic or confronting content ACTUALLY hurts a brand’s image and, far more importantly, that brands sales?
How come no one ever asked this question of ad placement against television news? Ads have no doubt played directly after coverage of extreme and horrific events (i.e 9/11, any of the regular US gun massacres and school shootings that take place, Catholic church child sexual abuse etc etc etc), yet no one studies nor even questions whether this has a negative effect?
Is it because of superior targeting and the huge volume of attributable metrics across digital, that suddenly this previously non-existent brand safety debate has been cracked wide open? I think yes.
Hi Jack,
That’s a great question – I’ve often wondered that myself.
It sometimes feels like the only damage comes from the PR damage of people writing about the placement – not the placement itself.
But I’d love to know if anyone can offer any data.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Let’s ladder this up.
If negative context has no influence on the viewer of an ad, then it must mean that positive context doesn’t either.
And that throws into question everything from physical sales teams (automate the process based purely on audience), any form of premium sponsorship (especially sport) and fundamentally we don’t need anything more than a single brand within each mass-media channel (if all content is valued the same and watched by the same people, then make all content the same).
So basically…Google.
Hi Tim,
JWT did some research just after the US election showing significant decreases in brand preference in ads shown after an election ad.
Unfortunately I’m on my mobile and can’t share it. But it came up easily in Google.
Thanks for that. I think you may be talking about this piece from JWT Intelligence – interesting.
https://www.jwtintelligence.com/2016/11/political-advertising-hangover-effect/
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Completely agree, it’s the same as the conversations around viewability. No one is questioning old methodologies for the older formats it seems. Anyone who has ever watched a TV will know it’s not 100% viewable, nor 100% in-demo nor 100% sound on.
And exactly as per the point you raise, nor is it 100% brand safe.
Could’t agree more. Just because your ad is seen before, after or next to negative content doesn’t mean people associate the two.
Surely the majority of web users are aware of how ad targeting works by now and understand that a brand isn’t actively deciding to show against negative content.
This exact question was addressed in a piece of research undertaken by James Jayesuria at Nature Research. In summary – you’re right. Brand impressions aren’t affected by the content which an ad appears alongside.
https://mumbrella.com.au/ads-followed-offensive-content-dont-affect-brand-sentiment-local-study-suggests-438852
Thanks Phil. More detail here for those that are interested:
https://www.natureresearch.com.au/2017/04/youtube-boycott-is-it-all-a-storm-in-a-teacup/
Feel free to get in touch.
It’s a very fair point — some of those mainstream publishers making the most noise about brand safety and quality issues inherent in advertising with FB and Google etc are themselves peddlars of some of the trashiest, low-rent content on the internet. People in glass houses…
Love your experiment Nic! This can easily be backed up by fact. We run 50+ million impression each month through comScore/IAS and find NewsCorp a regular feature on our Brand Safety red alerts list. In fact we now have a few of their URLs on our blacklists!