Achieving Brand Safety to Brand Suitability

When it comes to displaying ads on a platform, the biggest concern of most advertisers is that their ads may not get displayed next to harmful or unsuitable content. And they also want to make sure their ads on the site offer a delightful experience to their readers. Ad placement next to harmful content can in turn have a major impact on their brand image and make them lose a large number of loyal customers.

Then, what is the way out?

Achieving both brand safety and suitability are equally important for advertisers. Fortunately, there exists human-augmented artificial intelligence (AI) adtech platforms that provide a perfect blend of brand safety and brand suitability to marketers. AI-powered context detection solutions deliver brand safety control without killing reach and they also solve the problem of content over-blocking. 

But, before moving forward, it is important to dive deep and understand the meaning of brand suitability and brand safety? What are the different challenges faced while trying to achieve them? Why is it important to have a blend of brand suitability and safety to make your ad campaigns reach the maximum number of people and give a positive ROI?

So, let’s get started.

What is Brand Safety?

Brand safety is the practice of safeguarding a brand’s reputation and preventing it from appearing in potentially hazardous circumstances such as hate speech, terrorism, illicit drugs, piracy, obscenity, death/injury, and so on.

Any airline company, for example, would not want its ads to appear next to breaking news of a plane crash. This sends the wrong message about the organization and will result in no clicks.

The basic purpose of brand safety is to link the brand with good, authoritative, and non-confrontational content. To eliminate unwanted or incorrect brand links, rudimentary tactics such as term banning and URL blocklisting were utilized to achieve success in this attempt.

What is Brand Suitability?

Brand suitability elevates brand safety to a higher degree. It is more than simply ensuring that the brand’s reputation is not harmed by the information around it.

More importantly, it is built on comprehending both the underlying meaning of material and the specific context of what is on the page.

As an example, suppose you are a publisher in the banking business. Your inventory is excellent for displaying bank advertisements. However, if reports of financial impropriety begin to appear in the news, the same banks will refrain from placing advertisements on such articles.

However, avoiding using the entire website for advertising may jeopardize the advertiser’s efforts. This is where keyword blacklisting comes in helpful for weeding out articles with ‘risky’ news.

Challenges Faced in Achieving Brand Safety and Suitability

Digital marketing innovation and growth have established the groundwork for the evolution of the advertising sector. Brands may now engage with their target customers more quickly, simply, and effectively than ever before. Also being able to assess results in new and more effective ways.

However, there are several challenges that businesses must address to attain brand safety. A company’s concern with brand safety is to prevent the loss of trust between a brand and a consumer. This is because, without trust, income, brand equity, and consumer interests are lowered or eliminated.

Advertisers must recognize that the brand safety strategy utilized in their digital advertising activities operates at the pace of culture. This can aid in absorbing new difficulties as they develop while not blocking too much information or allowing unsafe/inappropriate stuff to slip through.

This is most common during keyword blocking as well as domain-level allow and blocklisting. Many keywords with varied meanings and URL domains that store information on a wide range of topics are shelved as a result of over-blocking.

Many firms fail to implement brand suitability successfully owing to an inability to identify a holistic solution.

According to a study about two-thirds of all brands had been exposed to brand safety risks at least once. So, we can say over-blocking does more harm than good.

Why Brands Can’t Afford to Overblock

Overblocking is not the greatest strategy for companies looking to optimize their performance potential. Brands have a mile-long negative keyword list in this one-size-fits-all strategy, which presents two big issues:

• Brands ignore valuable placements, such as reliable news providers, punishing genuine material and resulting in their advertisements being placed on “safe” but low-quality content.

• Ineffective keyword filtering can prevent advertisements from reaching new and relevant customers, making it more difficult for marketers to locate audiences and interact with them.

So, how can brands strike a balance between safety and suitability? The key is a mix of brand safety and brand suitability, which means that businesses must consider not just that they are reaching the audience in a safe environment, but also the context in which they are reaching them.

Why is There a Need to Achieve Brand Safety and Brand Suitability?

Brand safety and company compatibility are always changing and play an important part in sustaining a brand’s reputation in the digital advertising sphere.

Brand safety policies have been highlighted by digital marketers, agencies, and media alike. This is critical if you do not want to lose clients as a result of poor brand alignment.

According to one study, 43 percent of customers have ceased doing business with a brand in which they have lost trust.

It was the COVID-19 period, when the industry noticed a trend toward brand suitability. Customers demand more from brands and want more control and confidence in the solutions they use.

Brand suitability bridges the risk-opportunity gap by enabling digital marketers to target safe, acceptable, and brand-building material using context-based restrictions.

A consumer packaged goods advertising, for example, will have a different risk tolerance (and consequently a different tolerance for edgier material) than a gaming industry advertiser. Finally, these advertisers must find out how to strike the correct balance between brand safety and reaching the degree of reach required.

Therefore, it can be concluded that there should not be a trade-off between brand safety and suitability, but rather a better mix of the two.