When brand safety beats viewability | Mumbrella360 video
With YouTube advertising in the headlines for ongoing brand safety issues, we look back to this session from Mumbrella360 in which Westpac's Toby Dewar says he'd choose safety over viewability every time.
While marketers argue over the issue of viewability in digital advertising, the head of media and agency management at Westpac Group has highlighted brand safety as a more pressing issue for the brand.
Speaking on the following panel from June’s Mumbrella360 conference, Westpac’s Toby Dewar says viewability and lost ads could always be addressed, but brand safety breaches were difficult to contain once they occurred.
When asked which was more important to the brand, Dewar responds “brand safety by a long way”.
“It takes me a lot longer to unwind that one impression run in a un-brand-safe environment,” Dewar says.
“If I lose 50% of my buy through viewability, I can address that more easily, so obviously brand safety overwhelmingly.”
Dewar said that the issue of brand safety had always been around, but increased awareness further up the corporate chain meant it had now become a mainstream issue and that further work needed to be done to address it.
“[Brand safety] has always been an issue,” he says.
“I think across all different media brand safety is very important but no doubt at the moment there is a spotlight on the issue. I think as marketers it’s our job to passionately build brands and a key way of doing that is also to protect the brands that we work on and that’s why the conversation around brand safety is very important.
“When you consider what’s happening of late in the last few months there have been some really big global brands and local brands have been caught up on brand safety on some big platforms and that tells me that we have probably not got it right yet and there is work to be done.”
