There is nothing more valuable than your brand’s and your marketing communication strategy should take care to protect it. The Brand is by far the most important intangible asset that a company owns. 71% of consumers are more likely to buy from a brand name that they recognize. Similarly around 81% of consumers consider brand trust to be a key factor when deciding to make a purchase.¹ Brand reputation can make or break a company, and your agency’s reputation for protecting your client’s brand will be essential to its success. One way to do this is by focusing on positive brand reinforcement and tying your brand in with positive social movements. For example in 2020 Nike launch edits “For Once, Just Don’t Do It” campaign, tied into raising awareness about racism in America. The advert received broad support, and was considered a more authentic response than those offered by other brands, providing Nike a brief boost in public image.

https://twitter.com/Nike/status/1266502116463370241

Despite this positive campaign Nike is also an example of the difficulty with rebuilding brand image. For a time the sportswear company was synonymous with sweatshops², and despite progress still struggles to shed that image³. Nike is far from the only company with dubious contractors, but this example demonstrates the first rule of branding “It’s easier to maintain a good brand, than fix a bad one”.

Brands Struggle To Control Where They Are Displayed

As more ads move online, and ad-bidding networks become increasingly large, policing where your client’s content is displayed is more challenging than ever. The last thing a brand wants is to be displayed in a compromising position that might go viral.

Unfortunately this is a common occurrence. In 2017 YouTube lost millions in advertising revenue as major brands withdrew their advertising dollars in protest of their content appearing alongside videos that promoted extremist views.⁴ Things have improved since then but ads appearing next to controversial topics still remains a hot button issue. Around 2/3rds of customers believe that ads shouldn’t appear next to controversial news topics, and 85% of customers said they would avoid topics that appeared next to COVID-19 conspiracies⁵.

Studies have found that consumers believe that brands are intentionally placing content next to malicious or negative content. For example, seeing a soda company advertise next to a video on diabetes would make consumers 50% less likely to recommend that brand to others.⁶

As a Brand You and Your Agency Needs To Put Brand Safety At The Core Of Its Strategy

This is a particularly challenging problem for brands and agencies. You could spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars crafting the perfect campaign, only to have the algorithm place it alongside negative content and do irreparable damage to your client’s, and therefore your, reputation.

There are existing solutions that you probably already use, including blocking unsafe webpages. However if you’re using Google Ads you are reaching out to a network of more than 2 million apps and sites.⁷ No matter how dedicated you are, there will always be a risk that your content is shown alongside negative content, this is where our Brand Safety solution comes in.

RTB House’s Brand Safety Solution Leverages Natural Language Processing

Rather than forcing you to check each website individually, an impossible task, RTB House’s solution leverages Deep Learning powered Natural Language Processing in order to conduct a precise inspection at the page level, including the URL, content, and metadata, before allowing an ad to be placed there. Our Brand Safety solution blocks around 80 million harmful impressions per day!

This solution is designed to be fully customized to follow your brand safety policy. It filters all traffic prior to buying ad placements, which can significantly lower budget waste. Additionally it offers a more granular scale of filtering than other solutions as we directly cooperate with supply partners, enabling our team to audit their websites regularly.

It also predicts the impact on the traffic of the campaign before applying policies and works on transparent, semi-transparent, and non-transparent URLs. The system also has transparent reporting, enabling you to understand exactly what has been filtered by the Brand Safety Panel settings.

This solution comes as a standard component of all of RTB House’s product offerings and gives agencies an unparalleled amount of control over their client’s brand safety, and provides them with the tools to prove it. If you would like to learn more please contact me and let’s set up a call.

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