Unpacking Brand Safety.
By: Daniel Courtenay
Tags: Programmatic, Digital Marketing, Digital Media, Brand Safety

Protecting your brand equity in a murky digital environment is critical…

It’s 3:49am on a Thursday morning and I’m awake, thinking about all the things that the day ahead has in store for me. Amongst what seems like thousands of thoughts flying around in my mind is the IAB Brand Safety workshop I’ve been asked to attend as a Panellist next week and what my approach to this contentious topic will be.

The topic is challenging to say the least, especially from where I’m sitting. The trouble is that MaxAxion, the media sales house that I run, still buys and sells from exchanges where the issue is rife and AdJoin, the Private Audience Marketplace that MaxAxion and Kagiso Media have built over the last 24 months was born out of the necessity to move away from open exchange, fraudulent, non-viewable, non-transparent and ultimately, non-brand safe environments — and therein lies the challenge. How do I discuss this without doing permanent damage to one while trying to justify the other? I think in order to do this you have to unpack what brand safety is and really look to understand the legacy issues that underpin it…

For the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), brand safety is defined as keeping a brand’s reputation safe when they advertise online. In practice this means avoiding placing ads next to the content listed below (ref; Bannerflow). According to the IAB this also involves providing a safe environment for ad trading. The result: a reduced risk of ad misplacement and a brand’s reputation unharmed. Plus the elimination of the funding of content and services which infringe copyright.

Depending on the Brand, these are typically the categories to avoid.

My first job in digital was working for a mobile advertising network (no names mentioned) -it was one of the worlds ‘Big 3’ made up of thousands of publishers and billions of ad impressions and a large number of advertisers looking to buy this traffic for ‘as little as possible. This was before programmatic, data and viewability became industry terms and process’ in these environments were still very manual.

I was the publisher manager for Africa whose job it was to bring in new publisher partners and manage existing publisher accounts to ensure they made enough revenue.

As a buyer, you would come onto the site and target by category which was pre-defined by the network and publisher i.e. lifestyle & entertainment. Now, these categories were defined by the publishers themselves and although we had a vetting process, it was manual and these things sometimes slipped through the cracks.

The problem was, for the sake of securing more revenue, an adult or gambling publisher could quite easily categorise themselves as lifestyle & entertainment and likewise a buyer trying to market a gambling product could so the same thing.

Let’s then say you, as the unknowing brand comes along and targets what you think is a straight down the line category all of a sudden your campaign ends up running next to ‘dodgy content’.

To make matters worse , this model was referred to as a ‘blind network’ which meant you’d not have the ability to look at where ads were running — sorry.

In addition, advertisers didn’t really seem to mind because the traffic cost them next to nothing and they were getting tons of clicks with decent CTR’s. This is way before conversion tracking was possible — just imagine for a second the number of untracked ad-fraud and lack of brand safety taking place in that environment.



More of these networks sprung up and the exchanges that we buy through our DSP’s or trade desks today are populated by hundreds and thousands of them with these legacy issues, in my opinion still prevalent.

Couple all of that with the advent of fake news, extremist sites, malgorithms and general click bait and you’ve got a pretty treacherous terrain to negotiate.

Fortunately the industry has moved on somewhat and an entire new industry focused on combatting ad-fraud, fake news, brand safety, viewability and transparency has sprung up to counteract these issues, but it’s still up to us to take responsibility where digital media buying is concerned.



I believe there are a number of areas we need to be focus on in, order to combat issues around brand safety.

· Brands, CMO’s and ultimately CEO’s need to take more responsibility and hold agencies and media buyers accountable. It is simply not enough to get a close out report that only speaks to clicks, impressions, CTR’s and spend anymore. The brand representative has to have more control and demand greater transparency from buying partners.

· AI and machine learning are great tools for the industry but they are not the be all and end all when it comes to media buying. There are manual optimizations that ad operations/media trading teams can and should be making i.e. blacklisting of sites and disabling certain category targeting while enabling 3rd party brand safety tools and 1st and 3rd party audience targeting where possible. It’s also important that the brand has a deeper knowledge of the tech and platforms in order to better understand what the capabilities are where buying is concerned.

· Understand what measurement means for you. The digital world no longer revolves around the last click. For many of us we continue to buy because something costs less and ‘performs’ better without taking brand equity into account. In many premium environments clicks and CTR’s may be lower than when buying from exchanges but If you looked at attribution modeling you may find that there was in-fact more engagement driving the user down the purchase funnel. You shouldn’t base your digital campaigns performance solely on last click anymore, while searching for the least expensive traffic — those days are over.

· Look to premium as a channel. In many instances the agency planner is looking to deliver on what the brand/client has mandated which is pay as little for as much as possible. If I said to you it would cost you R100CPM to make sure you didn’t end up next to adult content, the decision would be a far easier one to make than I’m getting more value from the Open Marketplace. Your brand is important — protecting it and its equity shouldn’t be a question.

· Use data to track the efficacy of your campaigns and to better understand which consumers have seen and engaged with your brand, campaign and messaging.

· Adopt and Omni-channel approach and optimise to the most brand-safe environment pre-determined by what brand-safety means to you.

· Look to work with brand safety partners. There are many that use technology to protect your brand from running next to unsavoury content by analyzing billions of impressions and evaluating them for Viewability, potential ad-fraud and brand safety.

This issue is real and as a responsible brand owner and custodian it’s up to you to take more responsibility. We can no longer simply mandate buying partners to get the best performance based on antiquated metrics and digital has to be held accountable. It’s bad enough that the Google and Facebook are eating our dinner but the fact that nearly 20–30% of all of the inventory in these exchanges is deemed to not be brand safe and coupled with, in some instances as high as 60% ad-fraud in exchange environments, it’s time to wisen up to the issues.

I’m certainly not suggesting we all stop buying from exchanges but I am saying that we need to be better. We need to level up and use the tech at our disposal to assist in getting there. We need to look at premium as a serious channel in the process and we need to remember how important it is to protect brand equity in a tumultuous digital media and buying environment.

Have a look at the 2017 brand quality report here. It doesn’t speak to ZA as a market but gives you a sense of whats going on in some developed markets.