brand safety

Brand safety’s detrimental impact on diverse, equitable and inclusive media goals is a question of automation gone wrong, ham-fisted implementation and industry leaders choosing the easy route, writes Charles Cantu, CEO and founder at Reset Digital. In this column, he reviews how brand safety’s DEI problem has developed and recommends steps advertisers, agencies and brand safety organizations can take to overcome it.

Advertisers often talk about supporting Black- and minority-owned media companies. It’s Mark Prince’s job to help them turn those pledges into action. As SVP and head of economic empowerment at Dentsu Media, he pushes brands to consistently diversify their media mix – and move away from one-off investments.

Brand safety has a hypocrisy problem. Violence that gets a pass when it’s a fictional TV show becomes flagged if it’s part of an online news story. But to what end? Plus: what Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales results portend for retailers’ prospects in Q4 and beyond.

Pixability started out contextualizing advertisers’ digital video buys on YouTube to make sure they ran in brand-safe environments. But now that consumers are watching more YouTube on TV screens than on web browsers (and CTV buyers are demanding media transparency with proverbial pitchforks), Pixability is expanding its brand suitability metrics to apply more broadly to CTV environments.

The state of advertising at Twitter is a hot mess. And advertisers are starting to react. Plus: a primer on the Google Analytics deadline delay and changes to Google’s clean room, Ads Data Hub.

VideoAmp released a tool that allows publishers and advertisers to compare audience viewership second by second throughout the duration of a program. The purpose is to help buyers target their ads more effectively. Advertisers have been demanding discrete program insights for targeting and measurement planning, Jonathan Bohm, VP of product at VideoAmp, tells AdExchanger.

The programmatic ecosystem is so complex and opaque that bad actors are able to game the system to fund hate and social harm. Now, advertisers are getting more concerned about funding harmful activity through ad fraud and high-velocity disinformation within social and programmatic ecosystems, writes Sarah Bolton, EVP of business intelligence at Advertiser Perceptions.

For women, finding health care treatment relating to sex is hard. But if you’re looking for “seggs,” that’s easy. DTC brands in the women’s health vertical are still stuck relying on algospeak to skirt around social platforms taking down their ads … As if marketing health care products and supplements for women wasn’t hard enough.

Contextual targeting laid the foundations of TV advertising – particularly by ensuring that ads were stitched into content marketers considered “brand safe.” With the advent of CTV, buyers put context on the back-burner in favor of more granular, first-party audience targeting. Now, the pendulum is swinging back again. Why? Two words: signal loss.

Marketers are often mission-driven. But too often, when informing the public through news and information is of utmost urgency, marketers choose to steer clear not just from bad or hot-button issues, but from all news content entirely, choking off potential revenue for news enterprises and doing a disservice to the public good, writes Dev Pragad, CEO of Newsweek.