Protecting Your Brand's Bottom Line: The Importance of Brand Safety and Suitability in Optimizing Ad Spend

Brand safety is crucial to the success of digital advertising as it helps maintain a brand’s reputation and ensures ads are placed on suitable and appropriate content. It is defined as keeping a brand’s reputation safe when advertising online and involves taking measures to avoid harmful content that can be damaging to the brand’s image. The Interactive Advertising Bureau has created benchmarks for harmful content to help marketers avoid unsafe content and execute brand safety measures. Brand suitability takes brand safety to the next level by considering the context of the content to ensure it aligns with a brand’s message.

Brand’s reputation

Brand safety is important as it safeguards a brand’s reputation, helps stay competitive, and optimizes ad spend. It is essential to ensure that ads appear in premium content where ad spend is optimized, and threats to brand safety can cause consumers to lose trust and decrease revenue.

Best practices

Best practices to ensure brand safety include defining a brand’s stance on important issues, avoiding generic keyword blocklists, and using contextual targeting-based strategies. The next era of advertising will require brands to find their voice and stance on polarizing topics rather than backing away from them. Brands must take a stand for what they believe in and then determine what they believe is safe and suitable to amplify their ad messaging.

Proactive contextual

Many generic keywords regularly blocked by advertisers cut brands off from large amounts of perfectly safe premium content for their digital advertising campaigns. Instead, brand safety should be enhanced by brand suitability, a proactive contextual targeting-based strategy made possible with new technologies that bring a nuanced edge sharp enough to cut through today’s volatile digital landscape. Analysis by contextual intelligence platforms during the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 revealed that many pages blocked due to COVID-related keywords were actually safe environments for advertising.

In conclusion

Brands must prioritize brand safety as it is crucial for maintaining a brand’s reputation and success in the digital advertising industry. To ensure brand safety, brands must define their stance on important issues, avoid generic keyword blocklists, and use contextual targeting-based strategies.