Brand safety and beyond: Rob Kay on IASâ€™ role in Indiaâ€™s evolving Ad industry

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, maintaining brand safety and suitability has become a cornerstone of successful advertising strategies. Advertisers strive to protect their brands from risky content while navigating the complexities of a dynamic advertising ecosystem. Rob Kay, VP - APAC, Customer Success Team at Integral Ad Science (IAS), sheds light on the significance of brand safety and suitability for Indian advertisers and discusses how IAS addresses challenges to help brands safeguard their reputation, optimise campaigns, and navigate the attention economy. Excerpts:

How important is brand safety and suitability for Indian advertisers in today’s digital landscape?

Brand safety practices have long been essential to marketing strategies. Historically, advertisers have always sought to protect their brands from risky content – things like hate speech, terrorism, and misinformation are generally considered threats to brand reputations. Over time, however, brand safety has evolved. While most brands agree on what constitutes unsafe content, the ideal advertising environment will likely be unique to a given brand. In other words, an alcohol brand and a children’s brand might agree on what content to avoid, but they likely have different ideas about what content environments they prefer.

Brand safety and suitability are crucial to growing your brand with confidence. In today’s content-heavy world, ensuring that ads are served adjacent to brand-safe and brand-suitable content is pivotal to executing a successful advertising campaign. Brands like Maruti, ITC, Coca-Cola, Samsung, Castrol, Nestle, etc., are embracing digital media quality solutions to safeguard their reputation, paving the way for other brands to follow suit.

What are the key challenges that Indian advertisers face when it comes to ensuring brand safety and suitability for their ad campaigns?

In the dynamic advertising landscape of 2023, the paramount challenge for advertisers is to establish the safety of their brand within the sea of content and ensure its alignment with suitable and relevant content.

Interestingly, the 18th edition of IAS’ Media Quality Report (MQR) found that the highest brand risk for ads appearing adjacent to offensive language was for mobile web display. The same report found that overall digital campaigns in India faced higher brand risk from illegal downloads, foul language, controversial content, and violence. Another challenge that advertisers will face is verifying brand safety within videos. This has historically been a problem, so working with vendors who can actually see within video content to validate that inventory is truly safe will need to be something Indian advertisers do.

The lack of awareness among Indian advertisers is something we’re trying to reduce with constant agency/ brand road shows, industry seminars, proof points, case studies, thought leadership, industry body partnerships such MMA, IAB, IAMAI, etc.

It’s imperative that Indian advertisers protect their campaigns from appearing against these risk categories as this could lead to the loss of brand equity that they have paid millions to build. All our efforts are geared towards ensuring that Indian advertisers protect their brands from unwanted content and place them alongside relevant, desirable environments.

How does IAS address these challenges and help advertisers protect their brands while reaching their target audience?

It’s important for advertisers to employ a multi-faceted approach to address brand safety challenges and assist advertisers in safeguarding their brands while effectively reaching their target audience in the digital advertising landscape.

Typically, the trajectory is “Start with brand safety”, in order to protect your brand from content that’s generally recognised as unsafe. For example, topics like hate speech and terrorism tend to present threats to most advertisers. Once this is accomplished, advertisers can take the next step and “Advance with brand suitability” by aligning their brand with content that perfectly matches their brand’s values or campaign objectives.

The last step in the journey includes “Going beyond with contextual targeting”, developing consideration that goes deeper to assess emotions, sentiments and whether the content on the page is relevant to the ads alongside it.

Here’s how IAS achieves this:

Employing inclusion lists that include trusted sites and other overrides.
Determining their risk tolerance for commonly evaluated content topics such as adult content, alcohol – and setting your brand safety settings to balance your campaign goals with their risk tolerance.
Providing real-time blocking mechanisms that prevent ads from being served on content that violates brand safety guidelines.
Offering pre-bid solutions that assess the safety of ad placements before an ad is served. This real-time analysis helps advertisers avoid bidding on impressions in potentially unsafe contexts, minimising the risk of brand misalignment.
Providing contextual targeting capabilities enable advertisers to ensure their ads appear in content that is contextually relevant and brand-safe. By analysing the content surrounding the ad placement advertisers can protect their brands from potential harm while effectively reaching their target audiences, ensuring a positive and impactful advertising experience.

The future of brand suitability involves contextual relevance, which is a developing consideration that goes deeper to assess whether the content on the page is relevant to the ads alongside it. For example, IAS helps advertisers develop innovative brand suitability strategies by enabling them with sentiment analysis – which uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to determine whether an article conveys a positive, neutral, or negative feeling to the person reading it. Advertisers can increase consumer engagement by targeting the environments that are contextually relevant to their brand or campaign.

IAS has expanded contextual technology to cover content beyond text, including images, video, and audio with our Multimedia Technology, powering Total Media Quality (TMQ). TMQ granularly measures for brand safety and suitability and addresses concerns of running ads adjacent to unsuitable content. Particularly on social platforms, technology needs to keep up with the user-generated feed at scale. With TMQ, marketers can invest in relevant, suitable content. IAS’ technology will power our next-gen targeting tools for advertising adjacencies to maximise campaign performance.

Programmatic advertising is gaining popularity in India. What are the specific challenges that advertisers encounter in implementing programmatic strategies, and how can these challenges be mitigated?

Programmatic advertising is growing exponentially, but the purchasing experience is getting more complex. IAS research found that industry experts cite media quality threats as the main challenge in programmatic advertising, with increased brand risk, ad fraud, and the lack of transparency topping the list. Ad spends in India are estimated to grow at 15.5% in 2023 to reach INR 1.46 lakh crores, as per GroupM’s This year, Next Year (TYNY) 2023 report. As more budgets continue to flow to programmatic advertising, ad buyers are increasingly pushing for greater media quality and transparency. Having the right to access data is the best way to foster transparency, so your organisation having direct contracts with all primary supply chain partners - DSPs, SSPs and Ad Verification vendors - can be extremely useful. Marketers can also increase transparency by deploying quality path optimization solutions such as Total Visibility.

Education and awareness among Indian advertisers are key to improving the media quality and boost digital campaigns.

How does IAS support advertisers in achieving quality path optimization, and what benefits can they expect from adopting such an approach?

In our latest Industry pulse report, marketers have shared that the lack of trust and transparency in the programmatic is one of their biggest concerns as they do not have insights into what spends are driving media quality and what is wasted. Media experts use supply path optimisation (SPO) in their digital marketing strategies, making quality path optimisation (QPO) even more relevant for purchasing high-quality inventory at the most efficient cost. Quality Path Optimisation (QPO) puts the advertisers in control, allowing them to manage and measure the effectiveness of their digital campaign since it helps optimise the digital campaign to avoid ad spend wastage. An important observation amongst marketers who opt for QPO is improved cost efficiencies within their digital campaigns. QPO helps to identify secure inventory as well as evaluate supply path performance. This helps advertisers to identify which supply paths are getting them the best results versus the ones that aren’t.

Some of the main motivations behind SPO adoption are:

Increased media quality
Purchasing high-quality media at the best value
Increased ROI for ad spends
Reducing waste in ad spends
Cutting costs, that is, advertising budgets
Increased transparency into the supply path i.e. ability to identify and diagnose supply path inefficiencies related to media quality
Linking financial data to impression quality

With attention becoming an increasingly scarce resource, how can Indian advertisers effectively capture and retain audience attention amidst the abundance of content and ads?

The first step for Indian advertisers here would be to start measuring attention with the help of ad-tech tools.

To succeed in the attention economy, digital marketers must adapt their strategies to align with consumer behaviours and preferences. This includes creating captivating content, leveraging personalization and targeting, utilising engaging ad formats, optimising for mobile experiences, and exploring new channels and technologies that can effectively capture and retain attention. To help our Indian advertisers analyse how attention is impacting their digital campaigns, IAS has developed attention metrics that aim to measure the quality and effectiveness of digital advertising based on attention-based indicators.

Our recently released white paper on attention ‘Taking Action on Attention: Volume I’ found that attention is a function of three key signals: Visibility, Situation, and Interaction. The combination of these signals can predict if an impression is likely to lead to a business result, thus improving campaign effectiveness.

Through a holistic media quality approach, marketers can drive results by simultaneously understanding and optimising toward consumer attention.

What role does IAS play in helping advertisers measure and improve their ad engagement metrics to thrive in the attention economy?

Attention-focused approaches are already shaping the evolution of digital advertising by driving trends such as native advertising, influencer marketing, and immersive experiences.

In early 2022, IAS’ media research team set out to test the hypothesis: Does media quality lead to greater attention? We began testing if core media quality metrics, like viewability and brand safety, lead to higher consumer attention – and we found that to be true. The team followed this finding by testing if contextual relevance has an impact on attention. Once that was proven to be accurate, our research team leveraged eye-tracking technology to understand how consumers interact with ads with varying degrees of media quality optimizations. While eye-tracking data verified that core quality metrics are instrumental in predicting results, holistic insights related to ad density, share of voice, context, and more can show marketers the full picture of media quality needed to maximise attention. These metrics provide advertisers with insights into the level of attention their ads receive and help optimise ad campaigns for better performance.

Marketers must take a holistic media quality approach in order to successfully harness attention to reach superior results. Comprehensive media quality measurement and optimisation solutions that leverage Visibility, Situation, and Interaction signals are core to driving attention.

How do you see the regulatory landscape evolving in India, and what steps can advertisers take to stay ahead in terms of brand safety and compliance?

For the modern-day marketer, evolving their digital strategies with one eye on the future is key to staying ahead of the competition. Keeping this in mind, digital media quality solutions play an essential part when it comes to getting the most from your digital advertising campaigns. With media professionals combating pressure to maximise their advertising spend and impact, it’s become critical to place QPO and media quality at the forefront of digital advertising strategies.

The Indian government recently passed the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, where consent continued to be the primary legal ground for the processing of personal data. As we face cookie depreciation, we will see wide scale adoption of advertising strategies that keep consumer-privacy at their forefront. Connecting with new consumers with the help of contextual-based advertising solutions in such an environment will help advertisers reach the new-age consumer efficiently.

In a market as large and dynamic as India, brands are becoming more conscious of the importance of quality impressions and safe brand environments. As a result, the role of verification partners is gaining prominence in creating a safe and transparent setting for brands. Marketers are realising that in an era of increased privacy regulation and greater demand for advertising ROI, working with IAS maximises their ad spend. IAS has become an essential partner for sophisticated advertisers looking to achieve more with less.

As audiences increasingly shift between different platforms and devices, how can Indian advertisers maintain consistent brand safety measures and message relevance across various digital channels?

Advertisers should work with independent third-party ad verification partners that have coverage and scale to activate its brand safety solutions across channels such as social, video, in-app, etc., giving advertisers more control over their digital campaigns.

Does IAS offer solutions for cross-platform brand safety and suitability, and how can advertisers leverage these tools effectively?

IAS does offer cross-platform brand safety and suitability measurement such as desktop, mobile web, mobile in-app, social, CTV, etc., so that advertisers can advertise across these platforms with confidence, ensuring that their ads are seen in brand-safe, suitable, and contextual settings. IAS is the global leader in digital media quality and our commitment to the digital advertising industry is evident from our data collection procedures and controls, which are MRC-accredited to meet the highest standards for validity, reliability, and effectiveness. An example of this is our recently earned MRC accreditation for CTV viewable impressions, an industry-first and a major milestone. We have expanded our partnerships with X, YouTube, Google Video Partners, and the Amazon Publisher Services Marketplace.

Accurately measuring ad campaign performance is crucial for advertisers. What metrics does IAS provide to help Indian advertisers assess the effectiveness of their ads, particularly in the context of brand safety and attention economy challenges?

We provide cross-platform support across leading social media platforms as well as Spotify, Microsoft Bing, and many more. Advertisers can analyse the performance of their digital campaigns on desktop, mobile web, mobile in-app, CTV, etc. IAS has developed attention metrics that aim to measure the quality and effectiveness of digital advertising based on attention-based indicators. Currently, we provide 15+ attention metrics like time-in-view, video quartile completions, volume up/ down/ mute, full screen plays, and many more that provide advertisers with insights into the level of attention their ads receive and help optimise ad campaigns for better performance.

Traditional brand safety techniques remain valuable tools for mitigating risk – when applied thoughtfully. For example, content categories are useful for assessing potentially dangerous environments. However, binary or rigid approaches to brand safety can limit scale and impact performance.

IAS provides a more granular, holistic approach instead of a simple binary (on-off) brand safety solution. Advertisers may generally agree on which categories are risky, but in practice exercise different levels of restraint. IAS Brand Safety features eight content categories, five customizable risk thresholds, and 250+ brand suitability segments that gives our advertisers more granular control of their risk tolerance for each major content category.

How can Indian advertisers use these metrics to optimise their ad strategies and achieve better results?

The adoption of programmatic-based solutions, involving a three-step approach: verification, optimization, and targeting are key to optimising ad strategies and achieving better results. We provide advertisers with actionable data to drive superior results. We help Indian advertisers minimise risk and improve performance by identifying overblocking or underblocking from legacy keyword lists, customising risk threshold parameters, and expanding with contextual segments. Using this approach, IAS has improved marketers’ brand safety and suitability strategies to make a significant impact across campaigns – protecting brands, improving ROAS, and increasing efficiencies.

For example, IAS brand safety and suitability has helped some of our global marketers by – decreasing block rates by 80% and increase scale using pre-bid suitability segments; identifying up to 61% of dangerous content that was missed by keyword list blocking; optimising suitability profiles in pre-bid to impact a 53% decrease in fail rates, resulting in an estimated total annual savings of nearly $800,000 for a brand. An analysis of IAS data showed a 73% decrease in fail rate when Context Control pre- and post-bid segments were utilised versus a similarly themed free solution.

We recently conducted a study in partnership in Catalina, a leader in shopper intelligence that personalises the shopper journey, to measure sales for a major CPG brand through the use of display advertisements in both mobile and desktop environments. We observed an 180% lift in incremental ROAS for ads that were placed in-view group versus not-in-view.

Since Brand Safety is focused on the avoidance of content that is risky to brands, and this requirement is different for each brand. Marketeers need to consider avoiding content categories such as: Adult, Alcohol, Gambling, Illegal Downloads, Illegal Drug, Violence, Hate Speech, Offensive Language, and Controversial. An added step here would be to avoid categories based on Advertiser Protection Bureau (APB) and Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) Brand Safety Floor and Brand Suitability Framework.

A tailored approach to brand safety means advertisers can exercise different levels of restraint, depending on which categories are risky but in practice. With more than 600+ industry vertical, seasonal, audience proxy, and topical segments available today for targeting and avoidance, IAS’ Brand Safety and Suitability solutions provide marketers precise control over unsuitable content avoidance. IAS provides a more granular, holistic approach instead of a simple binary (on-off) brand safety solution.