The evolving face of brand safety in a complex digital ecosystem

“Brand safety will always serve an essential role for the advertisers and publishers. Recently, there has been an industry shift to brands’ suitability, thanks to COVID pandemic, as marketeers seek more control and confidence in the solutions that they deploy. It’s becoming clear that rudimentary brand safety tactics aren’t as effective as they once were,” remarked Prasad Shajale, Founder & CEO, Logicserve Digital, while moderating the panel discussion on ‘Effective Brand Safety Strategies for a Rapidly Evolving Digital Advertising Ecosystem’. The session was part of the Day 3 proceedings of the 6^th edition of the DIGIXX Summit & Awards 2022.

The panelists included:

Anurag Khurana, Founder & CEO, Penta Esports

Gopa Menon, Head – Digital, South Asia, Mindshare

Devika Sharma, Director – Sales, Glance

Sameer Wanchoo, CMO, Eureka Forbes

Speaking his views on the topic, Anurag Khurana said, “Brand safety is communicating the brand message in the right way to the audience. And since Esports, the industry I’m representing, is for the youth, we have to be very careful with the messaging of the brand there, because interpretation by youth on that brand messaging could be different if we try to be innovative. Innovative is a good thing, but innovation to a limit is better.”

Samir Wanchoo pointed out that there were a lot of aspects of brand safety in terms of proper brand messaging and following the brand guidelines. “Today, in the age of digital marketing you have got situations where the pages and the ads misalign because of personalisation attempts. These also are brand safety because they impact the way the viewer sees your brand,” he added.

Wanchoo further said, “The other aspects of brand safety may not be all related to consumer communication, but also with culture change internally. So, you may have an employee who makes a remark, which maybe an extremist remark or a culturally insensitive remark; that will also affect the brand because the employee is also related to the brand, hence, it is not only about external communication. Every employee is a custodian for the brand. I would say brand safety is a little more complex word. It has got many more layers to it. Apart from the aspects of safety, there is also the matter of suitability. What is a suitable environment for a youth sports brand may not be the same suitable environment for an insurance brand, so every brand person has to define the suitability and safety paradigm for the brand and then find ways to monitor it and find ways to implement the same.”

Along similar lines, Devika Sharma, too, said that brand safety covers not just aspects of safety, but also suitability of content. She further said, “From a publisher lens, our role is to work with brands and see how best we can enable that. There is context which matters, and putting brands to their respective uses in the best possible context that would yield the best outcome for the brand as well as making sure that the brand is not associated with any objectionable content on the publishers or the platform side that the brand is working with. And that is what a publisher would endeavour to do.”

Speaking from a Glance perspective, Sharma said, “We have a singular process that ensures there is no objectionable content that is published on Glance, so the process is really straightforward. All content that is on Glance is curated using AI-led tools, supported by human intervention both in terms of moderation and approval. This is based on three principles, which are to define who we are as a brand and not leave our consumers with any bad experiences, the second is making sure the consumers don’t witness anything inappropriate through our platform, and the third principle is our relationship with OEMs.”

According to Gopa Menon, from a discussion standpoint, brand safety is very clearly brand messaging – whether internal or external being served right at the right environment. “If you are able to actually put that messaging right, you are pretty much there. Once you know what a brand stands for and how does it translate to the media placements, the compliant platform and agency can collaborate and arrive at some of the definitions that are attributable to brand safety. At Mindshare, we consult with clients and understand their thinking on what’s safe for them, their risk tolerance to inform tactical planning and then apply a MRC accredited third party verification tool to monitor, filter and block invalid inventory,” Menon added.

These are edited excerpts. For the complete discussion, please watch below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajunjIdkxPg