Brand safety tools can block valuable inventory and limit campaign performance believes Richard Reeves, Managing Director, AOP. Discover why working directly with premium publishers delivers better results for brands.

Brand safety solutions hinder the performance of open web campaigns and suppress publisher revenues. This has been a consistent issue for the better part of a decade. Yet brands, the very entities that brand safety solutions supposedly serve, are largely unaware that such solutions are preventing a significant proportion of their marketing spend from reaching consumers. 

The AOP has the privilege of holding forums that bring together premium publishers and some of the UK’s biggest brands. Our initiatives have facilitated closer bonds between the best of the buy-side and sell-side in the advertising trade.

Through these meetings, we have realised that brand marketers have been kept in the dark about the unnecessary and extractive barriers that stand between them, their publisher counterparts, and the audiences they serve.

It’s important to note this is through no fault of their own. Brands entrust the legwork of getting their ads placed in online publications to their agencies and the web of intermediaries that operate the digital advertising supply chain. The details of the solutions used and the “tech tax” they each add are typically not scrutinised, though this is changing.

Due to a combination of economic pressures and the increased proportion of marketing functions that are being in-housed, brand CMOs are more willing than ever to dive into the nitty-gritty of how their ads are served, and the costs associated with doing so. Obstructive brand safety solutions are a line item that they would be wise to strike off.

Brand safety harms the brands it’s meant to help 

Brand safety solutions automate the process of preventing adverts from being placed alongside content that would be deemed inappropriate for the brand or its messaging. Though there are advanced contextual solutions that can understand the nuance of content and filter out unsafe placements with precision, brand safety is typically determined by broad-brush blocklists.

The classic example is “shoot” in the context of a football game being labelled as violent, and there are countless other ludicrous examples that any publisher would be able to rattle off with ease.

While news publishers are hardest hit by brand safety solutions due to the nature of what they cover, any publisher can fall foul of perfectly good inventory becoming effectively demonetised. Brand safety extends to topics considered potentially politically contentious, resulting in LGBTQ+ and other minority-focused content being blocked by default.

Among our members, brand safety solutions result in as much as 40% of inventory being blocked. It’s obvious why this is bad for publishers, but it’s bad for brands too. A significant proportion of their ads don’t get served to audiences that could be potential customers, and they are often none the wiser this is occurring at all. 

Premium publishers deserve a blanket brand safety bypass

An alternative to relying on automated brand safety solutions is to treat premium publishers as brand safe by default. Audiences visiting such sites trust the quality and integrity of the advertising environment. They understand the commercial relationship between advertising and the content they engage with, and that adjacency to even the most troubling topic is not an endorsement for it.

Premium publishers are also perfectly capable of filtering for brand safety themselves. Editorial teams use their discretion to remove ad slots from content they do not believe is suitable for monetisation. If a brand does have certain red lines that they do not want to cross, this can be established through a conversation rather than left to the whims of an algorithm.

Direct partnerships between brands and premium publishers not only remove the friction and impediments of intermediary technologies such as brand safety solutions, they also deliver a level of transparency and accountability that simply cannot be found among the Big Tech platforms that consume the majority of advertising spend.

Within such platforms, brands have to take it on faith that their adverts were served appropriately, with limited metrics to guide decision making beyond CPMs. Many premium publishers, aware they have to work twice as hard for half the recognition, offer a suite of levers for brands to play with: attention, viewability, engagement, emissions, trust uplift, sales outcomes, and so on.

For far too long, technical complexity has been used as an excuse for why brands cannot look inside the black boxes that decide how their marketing budgets are spent. Premium publishers offer an alternative, where every penny of spend is accounted for, with no unnecessary tolls between brand and consumer, all backed up by robust first-party data and insights.

Finally, we cannot ignore the ethical implications of where advertiser spend ends up, and we know through our discussions with brand marketers that this weighs on them too. It goes without saying that this is a challenging time for the integrity of the information ecosystem. Premium publishers — and the reporters, journalists, columnists, reviewers, critics, and content creators of all stripes that they support — are under immense pressure.

Rather than spend on platforms where profits are ultimately carted off to Silicon Valley, partnerships with premium publishers fund the continued creation of trusted, regulated, quality media that entertains and informs the public. There is no replacement for the work that they do.

By bypassing brand safety barriers and working directly with premium publishers, brands can ensure that this work continues while reaching the best audiences that the internet has to offer.