If you advertise your brand online, there’s a good chance your ads have been placed next to inappropriate content on the internet. 3 out of 4 brands have been exposed to online brand safety issues in the US alone, raising alarms for brand safety controls and policies that protect advertisers from unsafe placement.

Safe digital brand presence plays a crucial role in strengthening a company’s market position and attracting customers, while unsafe brand presence can lead to negative consequences, like online outrage, brand embarrassment, or much worse. As social media and ad presence have led to incredible growth for digital brands, there are also threats and risks associated with running automated campaigns. Keeping your brand safe is a demanding challenge, especially when it comes to how many online spaces are out there.

Brand Safety is an essential part of today’s programmatic media buying and marketers need to know how to protect their brands effectively.

Running Campaigns Online? You Need Brand Safety.

For example, let’s assume that you’re the head of marketing for an automotive brand. You would never want to have advertisements of your cars near online information about road accidents or alcohol consumption. But how can you avoid it when programmatic chooses placement without your knowledge?

It’s not a simple topic, especially today when ads follow users on different websites, often tailored to their preferences based on previously visited pages. Today’s internet is also driven, in large part, by user-generated content that can be difficult to identify. The media landscape is completely different from the one we knew a few years ago.

Real life examples show just how complex the problem can be. A recent The Times investigation revealed that that “some of the world’s biggest brands were advertising on YouTube videos showing scantily clad children that attracted comments from hundreds of pedophiles”. Dozens of global and popular brands with ads appeared on those videos.  YouTube’s brand-safety issues may be one of the main factors, which caused its ad sales to flatten during 2018.

Today, digital marketing brands must absolutely avoid presenting their brands in the contexts which can have negative consequences. Luckily, tools and technologies are on the rise to keep brand safety instact, while making it simple and painless for the marketers running their campaigns. 

Developing Brand Safety Tech

The biggest internet giants are already using advanced technologies such as AI, deep learning and computer vision to avoid ad misplacements next to inappropriate or disturbing content.

For example, Google unveiled a new ad unit for AdSense. It uses machine learning via its “Auto Ads” that automatically reads a page to detect and place ads that might be most appropriate to place there. According to Google, publishers can earn up to 10 percent more by using it.

But there’s much more going on in digital world. By training software to think more like a human brain, an advanced branch of AI called deep learning can boost brand safety capabilities to whole new level.

Multilayer Brand Safety at RTB House

Brand safety is a complex subject, which means its solution must be similarly advanced. RTB House strives to ensure a brand safe environment for all of our partners. In order to do this,  we implemented a Multi-Layer Brand Safety mechanism that prevents ads from being served to sites that may have negative effects on our client’s brand. It consists of SSP and 3rd party solution Layer (External Layer), Offensive Content and Malware Layer (Internal Layer), and Brand Profile Layer (Customizable Layer).

SSPs AND 3RD PARTY SOLUTIONS LAYER

Almost all the SSPs which we are integrated with have their brand security mechanisms. In most cases, this first content check layer   filters any illegal or offensive websites. In addition to SSP mechanisms, we also use 3rd party solutions e.g. Google Play Protect – Google’s built-in malware protection for Android.

OFFENSIVE CONTENT AND MALWARE LAYER

This layer does the double check of the SSP and 3r party solutions layer. This solution was developed 100% by RTB House, and it is automatically activated. In this layer, we also use some 3rd party solutions e.g. Google Safe Browsing API that detects unsafe web pages that contain malware or phishing content.

BRAND PROFILE LAYER

Brand Profile Layer is fully personalized and allows to filter content that is legal, but which may not be in line with an advertiser’s brand safety policy.

This is an entirely unique solution on market, developed internally at RTB House. It is fully customizable so that every advertiser’s brand policy can be treated individually.

The core and the essential part of our solution based on natural language processing. Our proprietary algorithm powers a new brand profile layer of software for rapid, comprehensive and precise inspection at the page level—including URL, content and metadata analysis—before allowing ads to be placed there. So far, we have cataloged more than one million articles, and we’re already auditing more than 16,000 of the most popular global articles every day. Our goal is to triple that daily auditing to over 50,000 articles!

The Brand Profile Layer includes three independent features:

Website category filter

As marketer you probably don’t want your brand to be associated with specific web content. Regardless of offensive content, marketers can use this to keep their brand positioning safe. The website category filter helps avoid sensitive website categories like for example offensive, politically controversial, user-generated content, file sharing, gambling, video stream, gaming, manga and social services.

News filter

If you promote an automotive brand, the last thing you want to see your advertisements near to articles about drunk driving or car crashes. Similarly, travel brands don’t want to be promoted within articles about fake news, disaster events, or political upheaval. The news filter automatically blocks news containing specific non-brand-safe keywords (both in URL addresses, in the content, or even in the meta page descriptions).

 

RTB Blacklist

The RTB Blacklist is simple and straightforward: If you don’t want to see your brand on specific website, it will just block your ads from chosen URLs.

Start Adopting Brand Safety

Brands now thrive or suffer at the hands of digital world. By adopting new brand safety policies, technologies and providers, marketers have the power to better control the spaces that they are (or aren’t) connected with on the internet.