Brand Safety: Protect Your Brand Integrity in The Digital Ecosystem
Imagine working countless hours to perfect your brand identity and persona, only to have it decimated in the mind of a potential customer in a matter of seconds.
This isnât a hypothetical horror story.
Most brand owners and teams spend a considerable amount of time and even more effort to build their brand. Itâs a harsh reality for many brands in the recent past. The culprit? Lack of vigilance to ensure brand safety.
Brand safety, in simple words, refers to the practice of ensuring branded content does not appear next to unsavory explicit, or offensive content. While most advertisers are painfully aware of their limited control over the placement of their ads, their consumers are not as discerning as them.
A few years ago, a media buying agency pulled its advertising budgets from YouTube and Google Display advertising platforms because of an article highlighting the appearance of ads next to neo-nazi and other forms of extremist content.
Just like the placement of ads next to âwrongâ content is bad for the brandâs perception, placement of the same ads next to complementary content can potentially drive better results. Ensuring the same is known as ensuring brand relevancy in digital advertising.
Both brand safety and relevancy are closely related topics and thus, may be confused with each other. However, in the high-stakes game of branding and advertising, there is no space for such confusion.
Difference between Brand Safety and Brand Suitability
Brand safety is all about ensuring your branded content does not appear next to anything that can be deemed offensive or extremist, or any type of content that your brand does not support. Common examples of such content include hateful content, violence, content that is offensive to a certain section of society, or content being used to spread misinformation.
In some cases, scandals involving influencers that are associated with a brand also qualify as brand safety concerns. Imagine a scenario where a health food ad running on video that contains violence or an ad made for adults featuring in Kidâs videos.
On the other hand, brand suitability refers to the practice of ensuring your brandâs content or ads appear next to positive and possibly relevant content. Brand suitability considerations take into account the context, meaning, and potential impact of a publisherâs content concerning the brandâs needs and audience.
In other words, brand suitability goes beyond the scope of brand safety (preventing brand content from appearing next to offensive content) and ensures that the brandâs content appears in a positive environment.
For instance, a âpositiveâ environment for an automotive ad would be very different from a positive environment for an ad for dog food. If the ad for dog food appears next to content about rescuing animals, it will probably perform better than the same ad appearing next to content about cars.