Role of Brand Safety in Digital Advertising

Brand marketing has evolved with time. In the past, it was more of contextual targeting that was focused on spending the ad budget in purchasing the ad spaces with the relevant sites only. However, the landscape changed with programmatic advertising. The advertiser started losing control of where the ad would be placed as the focus shifted towards behavioral targeting.

While the focus is on targeting the right audience, it is crucial to ensure the brand reputation. For example, if the ad for a beauty product gets placed on a website that has anti-social content, it will surely tarnish the company’s reputation. In 2017, reputed brands like AT&T and Verizon withdrew themselves from online ad purchases as their content was appearing alongside the terrorist sympathizers’ content.

What is Brand Safety?

The measures taken to ensure that the ad is placed alongside the content that aligns with the company’s values and ethics and does not pose any risk to the brand value is termed brand safety. It, indeed, is a challenge to ensure brand safety with the availability of a myriad of social media platforms, apps, and websites where your ads can appear. The primary challenge is to ensure that the ad placement is avoided on platforms with inappropriate, offensive, or content that can be in the form of fake news, provocative content, or explicit content.

However, the term brand safety is ambiguous as the approach or definition of safety may vary from brand to brand and also from product to product that is being advertised. Thus, the brand safety approach taken by different publishers also depends on brand suitability.

Brand Safety in UAE.

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