Nowadays, when so many advertising activities take place online, it is extremely important to not only look after the marketing creations used, but also the advertising context. Contextual adjacencies will help to effectively protect brand reputation as well as keep existing and attract new customers at the same time. How can you protect brand reputation while advertising online? Which brand safety solutions should be taken into consideration?

In this article you will learn:

• Why a brand is the most valuable asset of an organization
• How important it is to control where your ads are displayed
• What is brand safety and why should it be put at the core of your strategy
• How RTB House uses NLP to help you protect your brand

Table of Contents:

• Brand – the most important asset of a company
• Brands struggle to control where they are displayed
• Why should brand safety be the core of every strategy?
• RTB House’s brand safety solution leverages natural language processing

Brand – the most important asset of a company

A 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. 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 launched its “For Once, Just Don’t Do It” campaign, tied into raising awareness about racism in America. The ad received broad support, and was considered a more authentic response than those offered by other brands, providing Nike a brief boost in public image.

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 sweatshops, and despite progress it is still struggling  to shed that image. Nike is far from being 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. Things have improved since then but ads appearing next to controversial topics still remains a hot issue. Around 2/3 of customers believe that ads should not appear next to controversial news topics, and 85% of customers said they would avoid topics that appeared next to COVID-19 conspiracies. 

Studies have found that consumers believe that brands intentionally place 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. 

Why should brand safety be the core of every 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. 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.

Your brand safety strategy should concentrate on crafting perfect brand suitability, which means not only avoiding negative adjacency but also identifying positive adjacency that will support you in building and reinforcing your brand. Controlling contextual adjacencies of ads means not only taking brand safety to another level but also positively impacting the ROI. 

This proves especially important nowadays as generation Z accounts for more than 40% of all customers – they are much more financially independent than Millennials and in the US alone they already spend $44bn annually and influence a total of $600bn in household spending. At the same time they seem to be more easily influenced by online ads when deciding what to buy.

RTB House’s brand safety solution leverages natural language processing

Rather than forcing you to check each website individually, an impossible task, you can use a leveraging solution Deep Learning powered by 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. How efficient AI can be? Our Brand Safety solution blocks around 80 million harmful impressions per day.

Best in class solutions are designed to be fully customized to follow your brand safety policy. They filter all traffic prior to buying ad placements, which can significantly lower budget waste. Additionally, such tools should offer a granular scale of filtering to allow you to create a tailor made strategy.

They should also predict the impact on the traffic of the campaign before applying policies and work on transparent and semi-transparent URLs. The important part is also transparent reporting, enabling you to understand exactly what has been filtered as per your settings.

Such a solution comes as a standard component of all of RTB House’s product offers 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 us.

As you can see, maintaining a brand’s reputation while advertising online is an extremely difficult task. By using artificial intelligence, it is possible not only to take care of the right neighborhood for a brand’s ads, but also better understand customer’s needs and find the most effective ways to target them and engage in interactions that will result in a high return on investment.