Brand Safety: How Can It Help?

Businesses are always concerned with their brand’s image. If the wrong messages are linked to your ads, your brand reputation can be negatively affected. This is where brand safety measures come in.

What Is Brand Safety?

Brand safety is not only one thing or technique. It is an entire set of business measures that are meant to protect a brand’s image and reputation. It does that by helping a company place its online ads on relevant and appropriate webpages that won’t have a damaging effect.

Brand safety has turned into an essential issue that needs addressing, especially when we think about the fabulous expansion of the digital marketing world. As a result of this concept, many businesses have cut their advertising budgets while also pulling their ads off of some social media platforms and websites, if they thought that those placements featured undesirable content.

How Does Brand Safety Work?

There are several categories one must avoid when launching online campaigns and choosing ad placements:

• Military conflict;
• Adult websites;
• Obscenity;
• Crime;
• Drugs;
• Hate speech;
• Fake news;
• Terrorism;
• Tobacco;
• Arms;
• Spam or harmful sites;
• Death and injury;
• Online piracy.

The categories listed above are the most common placement environments that are considered risky. However, each company should take a moment to define the exact content types that they see as unfit or unsafe for their brand.

One example of how not to do things would be an airline company that chooses to display its ad right next to plane crash news. That would be an unfortunate decision.

Brand Safety Measures

To make sure that brand safety is implemented, companies and advertisers should always buy ad space from reputable and trusted publishers only. This will further lead to strong collaboration and transparent communication between advertisers and publishers.

When needed, these two parties could also think about hiring a specialized vendor that can tackle all the brand safety issues and come up with effective solutions that can be easily included in the overall advertising system.

Another useful preventive measure is represented by the so-called blacklists, which are all the unsafe websites you should avoid. Some companies even create white lists that feature all the webpages that are safe for advertising purposes.

How Can Brand Safety Help Your Business?

It is tricky to find the right sites for your ads, especially because nowadays, webpages are no longer immune to inappropriate news. Also, reputable websites that could easily be included in your white list are more expensive in terms of ad placement.

Through contextual intelligence, brand safety technology offers a higher level of transparency. Instead of going old-school and blacklisting a bunch of URLs, brand specialists can now create customized keyword-based blacklists to make sure that their ads won’t appear on webpages that are related to one or several of those keywords.

This strategy builds trust, makes your company stand out while also differentiating it from its competitors, and it helps you make a change that will improve the entire advertising ecosystem.

How to Protect Your Brand

You can take numerous effective measures to protect the image of your brand. One of these solutions is brand safety. Here’s what you should do:

• Define the concept of brand safety and what it really means for your company;
• Focus mainly on content and transparency;
• Buy ad space from reputable providers;
• Avoid blacklisted publishers;
• Monitor your campaigns by using insights.

If you want to lower the risk of ad misplacement, you should definitely consider brand safety implementation to keep your brand’s reputation unharmed. This could feel too complicated to do but, with the right experts by your side, you will become able to address any related issue that might appear.