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.

Keyword blocklists are blunt instruments, and yet they persist in programmatic media buying. It’s time to kick blocklists to the curb and start curating keywords by campaign, says contextual pioneer John Snyder, who sold his company, Grapeshot, to Oracle in 2018.

If you were at the Twitter NewFronts presentation on Wednesday evening in New York City and played a drinking game that required you to take a sip every time a Twitter executive said “Elon” or “Musk” … then you would have been stone-cold sober by the end of it.

Brand advertisers want the chance to engage with consumers in the metaverse. But platforms and publisher reactions are more … “meh.” The media industry should be cleaning up our current digital environments before “mucking up the metaverse,” writes Gavin Dunaway, product marketing lead at The Media Trust.

Meta announced plans on Thursday to create content-based controls for Feed (formerly News Feed) on Facebook and Instagram. The question is, why did it take so long for Meta to start bringing third-party brand suitability to Feed? After all, the News Feed was one of Facebook’s first products, launched during the long-ago year of 2006.

Pharma’s digital transformation has accelerated media spending on video across devices. And media buyers in the pharma space have ways to overcome the additional challenge of needing to adhere to numerous regulations, writes Kelly McAloon, Associate Media Director of Programmatic at Good Apple.

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Blown AMP Publishers are pulling the plug on Google AMP. Vox and BuzzFeed (and other titles within their portfolios) are testing or considering testing their own mobile optimization pages, which they expect to generate at least 20% more revenue than Google AMP pages […]

It’s nearly impossible to say “women’s sexual health” and “brand-safe” in the same sentence. Achieving brand safety on social platforms through algorithmic decisioning has been a focus for platforms, who face pressure from advertiser clients and, increasingly, lawmakers who see algorithms amplifying misinformation. But Facebook’s algorithmic blocking of ad creative is similarly askew, creating “false […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. LOL Remember Comscore Rankings? Digital publishing is in a period of self-reflection. Instead of bragging about mass reach, the new norm will be looking at rational numbers to evaluate reach and readership, writes Brian Morrissey, former president and editor-in-chief of Digiday who now writes […]

You can outsource a surprising amount of your operations to Big Tech. But that comes with a range of costs and risks that are important to weigh against the benefits and opportunities, writes Martin Coady, executive director of marketing technology and Tech Studio lead at VMLY&R.

With the looming threat of privacy crackdowns across the globe – and big platform changes coming – contextual advertising is starting to look pretty good again. And not just on the open web – on TV, too. On Wednesday, Precise TV, a kid-safe contextual advertising platform for YouTube, announced a partnership with video data platform […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. Neeva Have I Eeva Paid To Search  The search engine startup Neeva launched its $5 per-month tier on Wednesday, Fast Company reports.  It’s small news – Neeva has some hundreds of thousands of users – but it’s an important marker because at least someone’s […]

As opposed to brand safety, which the IAB defines as content that’s “generally considered to be inappropriate for any advertising and unfit for publisher monetization regardless of the advertisement or brand,” brand suitability is a more nuanced affair.

Blocklists are still a big problem for publishers, says Scott Gatz, CEO and founder of LGBTQ publisher Q.Digital. Way back in 2019, Gatz wrote a provocative column for AdExchanger with the headline, “Marketers, Do You Know What’s On Your Block Lists?” Unfortunately, the answer to that question is still … no. “I really wish I […]

Ad verification and measurement provider DoubleVerify is set to acquire Berlin-based ad tech company Meetrics, a deal that will help fuel the newly minted public company’s global expansion. The all-cash purchase is expected to close in the third quarter of 2021. DoubleVerify CEO Mark Zagorski declined to disclose the sale price. Meetrics was founded in […]

The “big two” in brand safety both went public this year. Over the next two weeks, AdExchanger will publish podcast interviews with both companies’ CEOs: Lisa Utzschneider of Integral Ad Science and Mark Zagorski of DoubleVerify. Utzschneider is up first. We kick off with a discussion of IAS’s acquisition of Publica, an ad server and […]

Fresh off its IPO in April, ad verification provider DoubleVerify saw its revenue increase 44% to $76.5 million year-over-year in Q2, fueled by the growth of programmatic. DoubleVerify took in $37.9 million in programmatic revenue in Q2 – a 57% increase from the same period last year – largely driven by its Authentic Brand Safety […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Jed Hartman, US President, Channel Factory. The evolution of digital media has unleashed a number of unintended negative consequences. Just to rattle off a few examples: The quest for impression-based scale led to advertisers […]

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. As more inventory becomes available programmatically in CTV, the issue of ad quality is coming up more often. Publishers, concerned about the messaging in ads being delivered, increasingly rely on DSPs and SSPs to filter out ad content that […]

Podcast discovery can be as challenging for advertisers as it is for consumers. “It’s a mass reach vehicle, but the targeting and anti-targeting that advertisers can do in podcasts has been very manual in nature,” said Claire Fanning, VP of ad innovation strategy at SXM Media, the newly launched unified sales team that combines Pandora, […]

Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here. VIP Access Cue the 1990s club track “Blue” by Eiffel 65, because Twitter just put up a velvet rope for users to gain VIP access for exclusive features. On Thursday, Twitter launched its first subscription service, dubbed Twitter Blue, with an initial rollout in […]