The Lack of Brand Safety in AdTech

Fastforward to today and there are services and technology that for the most part prevent such offensive ads or make it easier to hunt them down but brand safety is more of an issue than it was then One might go so far as to say it39s now an existential threat to our industryWhy Because we don39t keep good companyProgrammatic started with realtime bidding because it had to To achieve scale it needed buyers and sellers and it needed fluidity before the big brands agencies and publishers could start to see that some level of automation would be needed to really get the budgets flowing Programmatic couldn39t have started with private marketplace deals as the primary transaction format amp160Digital would have starved to death waiting for things to happenBut with the open exchange model came some bad actorsamp160Malvertisers Botwielding fraudsters Fake news sites The lack of quality in the inventory being bought and sold brought us verification and viewability vendors who have shed a light on just how bad things can beThis has resulted in several wakeup calls Ad blocking Marc Pritchard from PampampG39s speech at the IAB Voting in the US and UK where fake news was certainly a factor Current digital advertising practices not only threaten the future of digital media but democracy itselfquotIt39s time we fessed upquot said Mary KeaneDawson former Managing Director UK at NeoOgilvy on a panel I moderated at the Brand Safety Summit in London quotWe are going to lose everything if we don39t address these issuesquotThe analogy I often use is of a mall I am from New Jersey with highquality clothing stores sharing space with sketchy retailers selling knockoff products The mall owners care but financially benefit from there being more stores than just quality merchandisers Consumers recognize quality but often find themselves wandering around looking for a deal They knowexpect to get lower quality or even ripped off By the way they even think less of the highquality stores for being thereFrom a publisher39s perspective there is no way to keep bad actors off the Internet but they may want to consider with whom they do business Part of the answer I feel lies in what Eric Picard labels quotprivileged programmaticquot Making private marketplaces work for premium buyers and sellers to transact at scale and relegating the open exchange to directresponse advertisersTaking the step of identifying the players and the pieces of the transactions will help publishers and brands Initiatives like DigiTrust TAG and AdID will bring a new level of transparency on who is involved Couple that with Blockchain and you might make fraud too expensive to commit You can download Jack Myers39 whitepaper on Blockchain belowAnother step is looking at content recommendation companies namely if the shortterm gain of revenue is worth the longterm cost Using my mall analogy this is a highend retail store selling knockoff products next to their own A commercial director for a large publisher confessed that the Taboolas and Outbrains of the world are in his words quotcrackquot amp160If publishers only steer toward such companies to drive up revenues without addressing brand safety concernsamp160they will find the same fate as many a crack addict There is no reason Taboola and Outbrain or a similar company can39t provide a more brandsafe solutionLastly publishers have to bundle audience with context Marketers want to reach consumers in quality environments but it39s cheap to reach those consumers on the open market so they often put quality concerns aside Publishers have to stop making it so easy Poor data policies and thoughtless audience extension buying impressions on the open exchange on behalf of clients only allows marketers to further focus on audience and not on quality interactionsThe good news is that some of the wakeup calls have started to actually wake us up Publishers alone cannot solve the brand safety effort but I think it39s incumbent for them to start and to lead the charge We are the company we keep and there is too much quality content being created to lose it allClick the social buttons above or below to share this story with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this article are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated bloggers

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The Lack of Brand Safety in AdTech

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