The 2020’s saw an increased amount of brand safety concerns from all brands because of misinformation, extreme opinions, and commentary on social media, video streaming sites, and websites. The issue of protecting a brand's image and reputation from the negative impact of inappropriate and harmful content online has become harder to control and oversee, resulting in many brands adjusting their advertising strategies, budgets, and pulling out of platforms that were once lucrative.
In Canada, June 2021 saw the beginning of a campaign to combat hate and misinformation online. The introduction of Bill-C36 was created to help regulate “online communications service providers” and to help combat online hate. For advertisers, this proposed bill could potentially help provide peace of mind when it comes to ensuring that advertisers on these platforms are not paying for their content to be displayed next to hateful or harmful content.
As social platforms like Facebook and YouTube continue to do their best to clamp down on hate groups and misinformation, advertisers are already on exodus from these platforms and looking towards new sustainable and responsible digital channels that protect both the consumers, and the ad industry.
This pivot by the media industry to better quality control efforts in a post-cookie world have helped brand safety risks decline. In the first half of 2021, Ad Science’s media quality report showed that brand risk had dropped across all formats and environments globally below 4%. In Canada, adult and violent content threats were minimized to 2.1% from 7.8 on desktop. When compared to mobile ads, fraud rates trended higher on desktop and lower across mobile.
This low number of ad fraud rates is what is helping drive many advertisers over to in-app mobile advertising. These advertisers on mobile can showcase their brand to consumers in environments that are both brand safe and compliant with consumer protection laws, while getting 100% visibility. On top of this, advertisers are putting themselves in trusted app environments that consumers see value in. This in-turn enables advertisers to reliably trust in these apps, and the first party and location-based data that they provide.
Today the problems with brand safety have not completely disappeared, but brands working with trusted publishers that provide a complete white-glove service, and transparent attribution can rest easy knowing that their brand is in good hands.
Carlos Guevara is the Marketing Director at APEX Mobile Media and was the host of the podcast "In Search of Good Data." He has also helped various organizations in the private and non-profit sector to become more customer-centric with the use of enriched data and modern marketing and advertising strategies.