Brand safety and advertising fraud

[Man]

In programmatic advertising, preventing fraud and implementing measures to protect your brand's reputation is of the utmost importance. For example, you wouldn't want your ads for online design courses to be placed on a site with porn content.

Violation of thematic compatibility, and especially posting ads on sites with undesirable content, not only tarnishes the reputation of companies, but also increases the risk of click fraud, since such resources mainly belong to webmasters who artificially inflate traffic. In this article, we will talk about brand safety and what can be done to protect the brand.

Contents
1. What is Brand safety
2. Examples of brand safety violations
3. How is brand safety measured?
3.1 Advertising format/platform
3.2. Context
3.3. Relevance
3.4. Brand safety vs. target audience coverage
4. How to protect your brand from fraud and inappropriate advertising
4.1. Advertising traffic verification services
4.2. Traffic filtering
4.3. Labels and Tags
4.4. White- and black-sheets
4.5. Closed advertising platforms
4.6. Direct purchase
4.7. Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

What is Brand Safety​

Brand safety is a set of measures aimed at protecting the image and reputation of brands from the negative or destructive influence of questionable or inappropriate content when placing digital advertising. In practice, this means that ads should not be placed next to provocative, intimate, misinformative content that could potentially cause harm or negatively affect the brand's reputation in the eyes of the consumer. We provide examples below.

Examples of Brand Safety Violations​

The most high-profile incidents involving Brand safety violations occurred in 2017 with Google. The company failed to address the monetization of offensive content on YouTube and its Display Network. Later that year, YouTube was found to be monetizing more violent and sexual content.

These incidents were not isolated, however. That same year, a slew of other incidents that occurred at the same time prompted advertisers to immediately stop or limit their advertising on nearly every Google ad format available, with the exception of search ads. Brands like the Guardian, AT&T, Verizon, Starbucks, Walmart, and others all stopped running ad campaigns on YouTube.

Google immediately reviewed its content moderation rules on its video hosting site and made a slew of changes. However, in 2019, companies once again faced problems with placing their ads on channels with low-quality content, which led to new boycotts from many brands. It wasn’t just advertisers who suffered. The purge led to a witch hunt, with various YouTube channels getting caught in the crossfire (some unfairly) due to the content of their videos.

How is brand safety measured?​

While it's impossible to measure brand safety with hard numbers, you can use a set of criteria to assess the safety of a particular ad space on a publisher's website or app.

Advertising format/platform​

Every advertising platform, ad format, channel, or placement carries some risk. To maintain a high-quality brand reputation, it is important to understand these risks and know how to avoid them.

For example, advertising in mobile applications. Foreign experts consider it the safest solution for brand promotion. However, from our own experience, we can say that this is not always the case. And here is an example from one of our clients:

The Wood Nuts & Bolts Puzzle mobile app (com.wood.nut.and.bolts.puzzle on the screen) was created to monetize and boost video ad views, as well as generate random non-targeted clicks on ads. This is confirmed by the reviews of the app on the App Store:

Let's say you launched a campaign in YAN, and the developers of the monetized application simply "stuffed" it with your ads and offers from other advertisers. Imagine yourself in the users' shoes - how quickly will you get tired of annoying ads and what will you think about the brand as a result?

Context​

Unsafe content can also lead to brand safety violations. But unfortunately, context is very difficult to control. In most cases, brands rely on built-in brand safety control mechanisms within advertising platforms and tools, as well as on marketers and other specialists who place ads.

Websites and social media can provide different levels of brand safety depending on the solutions used and the specifics of each platform. In the case of advertising on news sites, key trust factors include whether news platforms avoid misleading headlines, correct or clarify errors, and differentiate between news and public opinion.

Relevance​

The relevance of a brand's theme to the context is a separate concept, but it also plays a decisive role in ensuring brand safety.

For example, a company that organizes tours to Egypt would not like to place its ad on a page of a website that talks about an overturned bus of tourists. Or an ad for a sportswear brand whose target audience is teenagers and young adults would not look very appropriate on a website dedicated to events for seniors.

In this case, transparency of the site owner's data and audience breakdown by categories are crucial to creating the right level of brand safety and a suitable advertising environment.

In addition, there is a lexical complexity in determining what phenomenon a particular term refers to - a brand (vital) or a general topic (informational). For example, a jaguar is a car brand or a wild predatory cat. More advanced technologies are needed for this. Using context, and not just the URL, to determine the general topic of a page is the first step to solving the relevance problem.

Brand Safety vs. Target Audience Reach​

The issue of brand safety and target audience coverage through advertising is another reason to pay attention to this issue. You can use different advertising formats (placing ads with influencers, banners on websites and social networks), but strict inventory filtering can significantly reduce audience coverage.

Advertisers who actively use blacklists (add keywords, channels or sites to stop lists) risk overdoing it and losing their target audience, among other things.

Additionally, brand safety technology can flag pages on popular sites as “unsafe,” which can lead to a loss of advertising revenue. For example, 21% of articles on economist.com or 52.8% of articles on vice.com are flagged as unsafe for brand.

However, new detection and contextualisation solutions are currently being developed that are expected to help the industry maintain brand safety and compliance without losing a significant portion of its target reach.

How to protect your brand from fraud and inappropriate advertising​

From an advertiser’s perspective, preventing ad fraud involves implementing various strategies and technologies to detect and mitigate fraudulent activity. These include:

Advertising traffic verification services​

Advertisers can partner with third-party services to check traffic quality and ad placement compliance. These services use advanced algorithms and machine learning methods to identify suspicious patterns and anomalies.

Traffic filtering​

Advertisers can also implement advertising traffic filtering mechanisms to block suspicious sites and junk sources. This is done by analyzing the behavior patterns and technical characteristics of visitors who clicked on the ad, and applying preset rules. In this way, advertisers can prevent their ads from being placed on fraudulent sites and applications.

Tags and labels​

Advertisers can also use tags to verify ads and track the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. For example, you can use UTM tags, which are then verified manually or using visual reports from anti-fraud and traffic verification systems.

White and black sheets​

Another method of brand protection that is available and used by advertisers. Blacklisting and whitelisting sites and keywords is the easiest way to limit fraudsters' access to advertising. Whitelists allow you to choose who to compete with and what other brands to associate with. However, this method has one drawback - it greatly reduces audience reach and limits traffic flow.

On the other hand, using blacklists allows you to avoid placing ads on low-quality resources and ensure a certain level of brand safety. However, as in the case of whitelists, this can lead to a significant limitation of coverage. Due to excessive blocking and ambiguity of keywords, ads can be hidden from partially and from the target audience, and sites can be mistakenly marked as unsafe.

Closed advertising platforms​

After the scandal with Google and YouTube in 2017, PMP platforms (private marketplaces) began to gain popularity. US advertisers placed up to 74.5% of digital media advertising on closed advertising platforms.

Programmatic PMP advertising is a cross between open exchange and direct buying, allowing advertisers to customize targeting, pre-bid, block keywords, and select some inventory.

Buy Directly​

Buying directly from the site owner is a great option, but only if the webmaster provides you with clean and open statistics and is ready to provide brand safety. Their site must be protected from bots, invalid traffic, questionable actions, defamatory content, etc.

The last point requires a multi-factor verification system for each article published on the site. Checking that the publisher performs automated semantic analysis of the content or manually sets a safety flag for each new article are additional steps that can (and should) be taken to ensure safety and justify the advertising investment.

Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning​

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are technologies that help marketers and advertisers automate and optimize ad fraud prevention and brand safety strategies. They help analyze large amounts of data and identify patterns, trends, and anomalies.

They can also help predict and prevent potential fraud and brand safety issues, as well as adjust and improve the performance and results of your advertising campaign.