… if you think about that, you’ll do things differently” – Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett’s quote applies straight to Brand Safety.

In this article from Which-50 Media, “Three Simple Steps For Implementing Programmatic Brand Safety“, Which-50 Media writes:

“The rapid adoption of omnichannel marketing executed through programmatic media buying has brought the challenges of brand safety, ad fraud, and viewability into sharp relief… It also put the programmatic advertising industry under scrutiny too, prompting a backlash from big media agencies and large brands, predominantly from the UK and US, to suspend their advertising with Google, with countless advertisers quickly jumping on the bandwagon.”

Advertising to be displayed alongside published content aligned with brands and customers’ values.

Yes, we agree with Which-50 when they say: “At the advertiser level, it prompted brands to question how they could ensure that their display advertising ran alongside published content that aligned with both their brand’s and their customers’ values.”

To do so, Which-50 lists 3 steps: Define programmatic brand safety, White and black listings and Private marketplace. On that part, we believe 2 and 3 can be combined with a greater White listing capability. So, 2 parts. Really:

Fixing both, the intangible and tangible.

The intangible keyword-based intelligence.

The brand, to be protected at the content level, a query must be made of keywords to ensure the “must-have” words and the “must-not-have” ones.

This is protect from the intangible, not arguable, environnement incompatible with the brand.

Example: an airline will not want to be near a crash. A query with unwanted keywords related to plane crashes will eliminate those pages. That’s Which-50 1st step. We agree.

The tangible source-based intelligence.

The second part is the brand values of the publisher been in line with the brand values of the advertiser. This is tangible and requires evaluations.

Those evaluations must be unbiased, universal and always up-to-date. And to not be too limitative, have to be large and broadly cover a desired market. Consequently, only AI, Machine Learning can deliver and maintain this. No human curation can do and must not do.

In our example above, the airline might be super high end and only want to appear in upper class lifestyle publications, or the reverse, target popular categories. Might also want to reach out to a special type of profile, like people interested in specialized publications like Law or Automotive…

We name this, Corpus Intelligence. The Corpus representing all materials used for a project: analytics, marketing, PR…

By providing desired and user-defined trustworthy content, Corpus Intelligence is the vital complement to any piece of content crunch, such as social intelligence (to feed products like Digimind, Synthesio, IBM Watson…) and Online Advertising Whitelisting (to feed trading desks, ad delivery platforms…)

Fix Brand Safety with AI-operated WhiteListing.

Can you afford to put your brand at risk?

Questions? Contact us!

 

Wonder what a brand safety violation means for your customers or prospects? This article from Marketing Dive explains:

Consumers believe brands intentionally place ads next to unsafe content, study says

Why? Because…

People believe advertisers picked where their ads will be placed.

“When people see online ads, they assume the advertiser picked that location intentionally. But that’s typically not the case. Even though organizations rarely select where web ads appear, ads paired with what your members may consider inappropriate content can have a nasty impact on your association’s brand, according to Daniel Avital, chief strategy officer at security and brand-safety firm CHEQ.” says this article on AssociationsNow

“75% of companies report being exposed to brand safety issues, but only 26% have taken some kind of action, and 15% haven’t adjusted their strategies at all.” – MarketingDive

“Seventy-five percent of companies report being exposed to brand safety issues, but only 26% have taken some kind of action, and 15% haven’t adjusted their strategies at all, according to research by GumGum and Custom. Another study by Sizmek found that four in 10 brands report delivering ads on unsafe websites, but 64% find it tough to implement an effective brand safety strategy, and 64% think achieving brand safety can negatively impact how quickly a campaign optimizes.”

“Whitelisting, which only allows ads to be placed in approved environments, may in fact be the best brand safety insurance.” – AdWeek

But, as Marketing Dive adds: “A simple solution is for associations to blacklist certain websites, so ads can’t appear on them, and then to whitelist sites they consider safe. While this is better than an approach that takes no precautions, Avital says new sites can always crop up that aren’t on the blacklist. And whitelisting severely limits the sites that ads can appear on, meaning organizations may not be reaching the people they would like to.”

The solution: Whitelisting from TrustedOut’s AI-Profiled Media database. Safe, large, unbiased, universal, up-to-date:

Related post:

Media profiles are key to Business Intelligence and Advertising. [updated]

Questions? Contact us!

 

Credits: eMarketer

The Brand Safety Dilemma.

Question? Contact us!

 

[Source and credits: AdAge]

On Monday, we wrote:

Media profiles are key to Business Intelligence and Advertising.

Unilever launches “Trusted Publisher” list.

AdAge writes: “Unilever is launching a Trusted Publishers network that goes beyond the standard audience-verification, anti-fraud and brand-safety guidelines of most marketer ‘whitelists.'”

“Both the publishers and the criteria will be continuously re-assessed”

“We’re aiming to have as many publishers as possible, but they need to go through these selection criteria,” DiComo says. Both the publishers and the criteria will be continuously re-assessed, he says, “because the space is moving so quickly.”

Unilever’s initiative is logic.

Knowing: 4 in 10 brands deliver ads on unsafe sites – Cision

Consequently: 70% implement black or white lists…

… but 64% fear negative impacts on performance.  71% fear to not achieve reach while delivering to the right audience in the right context. – Cision & Digiday

Consequently, the solution is to:

1/ Have marketers define their white lists themselves for each campaign, each brand. And align in each country.

2/ Have those lists automatically built, maintained and updated, directly serving the trading desk.

Bottom line: Keep your Brand Safe, let TrustedOut manage your white lists.

Watch a demo.

Contact us:

 

 

Example of a taxonomy DNA: BHG.com
Mouse over to zoom

Media profiling:
Collection and Classification.

TrustedOut profiles media via data collection to gather intangible data and content classification to evaluate expertise and perception.

Data collection.

From a domain, here for our example, bhg.com, TrustedOut will collect a lot of intangible data such as: its name: Better Homes and Gardens, the owner, here, Meredith Corporation, the organization type, here it’s a Private company, find if content orientations are declared, here, no political, no religious orientations, the online traffic, the revenue, the number of employees, etc, etc…

All those informations are important when defining what the analyst, the CMO, the ad agency, trust, and want to base intelligence, fully ensure brand safety, understand who’s receptive to a message, a promotion, etc…

Content classification.

Content classification is used primarily for our taxonomy and to understand how an information source is perceived, like “spotted as” fake news, junk science, conspiracy theory…

Here’s how it works:

Mouse over to zoom

Let’s have look at BHG.com’s taxonomy.

As described above, our AI-operated taxonomy permanently assesses where the site is good at, meaning non only, the subjects covered, but also, the level of expertise.

Another view of BHG.com’s taxonomy is below with the top classification level and a drill down on this top level, here: People.

Our taxonomy tells us BHG is Specialized in:

People
People › Entertainment And Leisure
People › Entertainment And Leisure › Gardening
People › Entertainment And Leisure › DIY (Do It Yourself)
People › Lifestyle
People › Lifestyle › Food And Beverage (yes! BHG has a recipes section)
People › Lifestyle › Decoration And Design And Architecture Specialized
People › Lifestyle › Home

and BHG covers the following:

People › Society › Family
People › Culture And Arts › Museum And Exhibition
People › Lifestyle › Feminine
People › Culture And Arts › Movies
People › Sports › Gymnastics And Fitness And Yoga
People › Sports › Horse Riding
People › Education › Preschool And Primary School
Sciences › Medicine And Health › Personal Health
Industries › Transportation › Bus

… and BHG has a Limited coverage in:

Sciences › Human Sciences › Sociology

Machine learning operates our Taxonomy and online perception to keep our database of media profiles, unbiased, universal and always up-to-date.

Importance for Business Intelligence:
No trust, no Intelligence.

Say you are in the food market and want to understand how some cuisine types are perceived amongst specialized publications in America:

To feed your intelligence tools, such as Digimind (demo here), your Corpus will look like this.

16,000+ sources (49k new articles abstracts a day) will ensure you analyze, and thus base your strategic decisions, on content you define.

Would you have thought Better Homes and Gardens would be part of your Corpus? At first, Home and Garden does not sound like Food and beverage specialist, does it? (well, if you are looking for Chicken recipes, it’s here).

This anecdote is to point out the need for both an unbiased and universal classification and a depth of expertise from the content you will base your decisions on.

It is critical you trust the right, and all the right, publications to trust any intelligence coming out of those publications. Depth and width.

No Trust, No Intelligence.

Importance for Advertising:
Brand Safety and Budget Optimization.

Here, you want to advertise your new product to the US Food Market. Keeping your brand safe will be your top priority… After all, you will pay to increase your business, not ruin the brand reputation it took you years to build.

Brand Safety is top priority for CEOs and CMOs.

For your online ad campaign, the trading desk of your advertising agency will define the query, with, amongst other things, desired and not-desired keywords, to select the content you trust compatible with your brand.

But a page can match all those criteria but be published on a site not safe or compatible with the advertiser’s brand. You must also select the publications you trust compatible with your brand.

Otherwise, your brand is at risk. And advertisers know and fear it:

4 in 10 brands deliver ads on unsafe sites – Cision

The only solution for the CMO to be certain to keep brands safe: Define himself the lists of publications he trusts compatible with her/his brands.

Consequence:

70% implement black or white lists… – Digiday

But while the vast majority is using lists, the vast majority is unhappy with the solution. As of today:

… but 64% fear negative impacts on performance.  71% fear to not achieve reach while delivering to the right audience in the right context. – Cision

Consequently, the solution is to:

1/ Have marketers define their white lists themselves for each campaign, each brand. And align in each country.

2/ Have those lists automatically built, maintained and updated, directly serving the trading desk.

Bottom line: Keep your Brand Safe, let TrustedOut manage your white lists.

Let’s go back to our US Food Market example. Our marketer, here, wants to build a white list of US based publications, specialized in Food and Beverage and also wants them to be in business for more than 3 years, not politically, nor religiously oriented and, of course, not spotted as fake news, hate news or junk science.

Corpus looks like above and now more than 9,000+ sources are immediately available to be imported or live feeding your trading desk.

Trading desk runs its query within the perimeter of the white list. Best of both worlds, search and directory.
Brand is now totally safe.

Run more where it returns more.

In addition, Media Profiles bring ad budget optimization.

By adding media profiles to a campaign report, marketers and agencies can surface media with the best ROI and thus, increase budgets where return is optimal.

BHG works best for your campaign? Let’s get more of this profile and spend your ad budget where it makes the most sense.

Update:

AdWeek just published this article “The Areas Where Brand Safety Measures Fall Short” and wrote

“Whitelisting, which only allows ads to be placed in approved environments, may in fact be the best brand safety insurance.”

Questions? Shoot!