How safe is your brand? We live in an era with a heady mix of media controversy, multi-platform media universes, cancel culture and a desperate need for speed and scale. It is a potential recipe for disaster.
“There are lots of examples of brand safety failures,” admits Jon Mew, CEO, IAB UK, speaking at NDA’s recent Foresight conference.. “Imagine an article in a medical site about the fear of being watched by a duck. And that was the ad [next to it].”
It may seem ridiculous, but brand safety is a big issue. Brands ads have appeared in all sorts of inappropriate places and that’s simply not desirable. Not for the brand, not for the consumer. It’s not just about appearances, brands don’t want to fund inappropriate content, let alone be presumed to endorse it.
P&G’s Marc Pritchard famously said back in 2017: “we have a media supply chain that is murky at best and fraudulent at worst… it’s time we come together.” This was a damascene moment for the industry. There had been schemes dedicated to promoting brand safety, but they weren’t exactly over-subscribed.
“The headlines, this [speech] and the narrative at the time emboldened and encouraged us,” Mew claims. “We’d created industry standards but we hadn’t really tried to lead the industry and encourage it to do the right things.”
Brand safety was also joined by a focus on ad fraud and user experience but it was a tricky balance to strike. “We have pressure from government to regulate our industry, pressure from advertisers saying brand safety is really important and media owners asking why they should [invest] in verification,” Mew states.
There’s clearly still tension in the ecosystem – Elon Musk famously stating recently that advertisers could…well, ‘go away’ is a concise summation.
How do brands cope with today’s ‘new age of new media’? Are platforms like X really a brand safety Wild West? “The real problem,” suggests Mew, “comes around misinformation. One person’s lie is another person’s truth.” But that’s still no excuse for doing nothing. “67% of advertisers said [last year] that brand safety is their key priority.”
One example of the struggle to strike the balance is in the high fat, salt and sugar (HFSS) regulation. Demanding no advertising of so-called junk food before 9pm. Responding to a complaint that this would just drive advertising online, the government suggested simply banning it there altogether. The unintended consequence of this would mean that the legislation also pulls in healthy foods such as avocado. It also stopped pizza restaurants appearing on Google Maps. You couldn’t advertise on Deliveroo.
“As an industry and as a government, we’ve walked ourselves into a situation where we’ve made it harder for everyone else to survive. We’re still talking about it,” Mew admits, “we’re not in the place we should be.”
Similarly, over-zealous blacklisting of words is leading to situations that would be funny if they weren’t so serious for the industry. Blocking words such as ‘shoot’ becomes very problematic when you want to advertise against content from Euro 2024.
But Mew feels there are encouraging signs. “There are whole different streams of work trying to tackle the problems of online advertising. Brand safety is a key part of that. But there’s never been a more important time for us to work together to get this right. The early indications are that this government wants to work with us. I’m hopeful.”
