10 Ways to Positively Step-Change Your Brand Safety Approach and Start Investing in Your Future Media Ecosystem #DigitalSense

At the Brand Safety Summit in London last month, I posed a challenge to the experts in the room: How do we flip our perspective on brand safety from it being a challenge we try to avoid to it being a positive opportunity for our brands and the digital ecosystem?

Certainly the media budgets we spend are first and foremost investments in growing our brands and driving sales. But inescapably, they also end up being an investment in the media owners and platforms that we choose to use. If we fund diverse voices, high-quality entertainment, investigative journalism and positive advertising environments, those will be able to flourish. If we allow our advertising to appear in cheap “made-for-advertising” (MFA) environments, or around hate speech and misinformation, or if we simply opt out of news and diversity, that will be the shape of the media landscape we’ll all be left with five years from now.

The reason many companies started to think about “brand safety” in the first place was because of extreme examples where people were called out for accidentally funding extremists or appearing alongside hugely inappropriate content. This led to a rapid rollout of new policies and brand safety verification tags, which play their part but give many advertisers a slightly false sense of security.

While avoiding the front page scandal is clearly something that keeps media leaders up at night, the real opportunity here is in adopting a far more nuanced approach. It’s not about blocking everything out of an abundance of caution; it’s about taking the right approach to different spaces that allows your brand to play into the best inventory out there.

We care about this in TV and other media environments. The internet should be absolutely no different. This goes beyond viewability and attention into real aspects of quality, authority and consumer value. Putting the effort in to land your brand in these spaces not only pays off in the short term, but also guarantees a positive media ecosystem for us all in the long term.

Almost every advertiser today has a brand safety policy of some sort, and many will have approaches that optimize toward attention and other quality signals. That’s just the starting point. Here are 10 even more progressive steps you can take:

1. Make this someone’s job

This matters. This really matters. If you cannot afford to have someone dedicated to brand safety and media quality, then at least make it a sizeable responsibility for someone on your team and give them meaningful powers to enforce needed actions. I did this role for Diageo five years ago, and industry leaders like Mark Proulx at Kenvue continue to show how critical it is.

2. Get into the weeds of campaign setup

A great brand safety policy is lovely on paper, but it means nothing if you aren’t crystal clear on exactly what that means in practice. The vast majority of modern media decisions take place within campaign setup of various tech platforms. I was recently part of a workshop where global media leaders walked through those processes and made definitive decisions on which settings they would choose. Be especially careful of “extension” products in search and social that can push your ads into entirely different environments at the flick of a switch.

3. Plan for human error

Until we’re all replaced by machines, even the clearest guidance is only as good as the people enacting it. With the best will in the world, busy in-house teams and, even more so, agencies potentially working across multiple clients will sometimes make mistakes or opt into different approaches. Some of these can be minimized by playing with the master or default setting for an account, but it still needs a constant audit. As a tool to combat this challenge, I love the Adfidence campaign setup governance platform, which in a single dashboard can give you a global view of where brand safety settings are setup right—and where you need to take immediate action.

4. Cut off the long tail

Ask your agency or buying team for a site list from a recent campaign. There is absolutely no reason any self-respecting brand would want to appear on 20,000 or 30,000 websites. It’s unlikely your core buying approach needs you to appear on more than the biggest 1,000 or so. (Trust me, there’s not much good out there beyond that—regardless of however cheap it looks.) The absolute biggest risks to brand safety (especially accidentally funding bad actors) are completely minimized outside the long tail; then you’re just dealing with suitability.

?5. Move toward inclusion lists

The biggest advertisers in the world are already ahead of you here and enjoying the dividends. Any approach that starts with an assumption that you’re willing to appear absolutely anywhere and then tries to block the truly bad places is fraught from the start. At the very best, you are playing into the hands of MFA websites that are designed to game viewability, attention and other bidding mechanisms. Whether you build an exclusive partnership list yourself, adopt an agency’s or partner’s, or simply take a public list like Comscore’s website ranking, moving toward inclusion makes your media safer and higher quality.

6. Apply different settings to different environments

While I fully appreciate that stringent brand safety settings are well-meaning efforts by brands, the reality is they represent a huge distortion between brand safety and suitability. There’s a big difference between appearing alongside an article about a sad event and your media having funded or provoked it. If you’re advertising in high-quality and trusted media environments, stringent block lists only limit your reach and defund meaningful journalism. Use key words to protect brand-specific suitability, but ease up on other settings in that space and then deploy them fully if you’re buying back on the open web.

7. Embrace do-not-block lists

It’s a shame to still be saying, it but there are many examples of overzealous brand safety keyword lists including generic words like “lesbian” or “Muslim.” While in principle these are included to avoid hate and controversy, the reality is they completely defund positive journalism and diverse voices. If articles about Taylor Swift are being blocked for triggering keywords, what hope do others have? Many agencies or diversity partners can provide simple do-not-block lists for you to check against your own. If your keyword list is thousands long and almost impossible to read through and maintain, then shorten it.

?8. Do not block the news

Again, I understand why some brands choose to completely back out of the network category, but doing so robs your brand of some of the most attentive and premium eyeballs out there. What’s more, if your media strategy is literally to defund quality journalism while accidentally funding click-bait misinformation, I have very bad news for you about the future of the media ecosystem you are supporting. Time and again, evidence shows consumers don’t see a negative adjacency between news articles and surrounding adverts. That’s why your brand is still appearing around TV news and in newspapers. There are services like Ad Fontes Media that can give you a more-nuanced approach to avoiding extremes and controversy, but please don’t block it all.

9. Plan for inclusion in your media plans too

Marketers have become better at representing and talking to a diverse set of consumers, but we don’t always bring that thinking through to our media plans. Not only can you make sure you’re not accidentally blocking diversity, but you can also lean into diverse publications and creators. Partner directly with them or build networks of multiple titles to have as special inclusion lists; you’ll find partners like Good Loop or your agency that can help here.

?10. Make intentional media investments

The promise of programmatic media to reach “the right person in the right place at the right time” is a nice one, but its practical application almost always reduces the “right place” to being “anywhere cheap they happen to be.” Trying to sell a luxury handbag in the toilet of a department store is not the same as doing it in the designer concession. Don’t always assume programmatic media is the right answer; direct partnerships sidestep the vast majority of brand safety issues and can offer 5x the value. When playing in the programmatic space, make careful and well-managed decisions. Your brands today, and the internet of the future, will thank you.

?A version of this article was originally published in AdAge

Jerry Daykin is a WFA Diversity Ambassador, Media Partnerships Consultant & Fractional Chief Strategy Officer at Adfidence . He has previously led global or regional media teams at brands including Diageo, Mondelēz, GSK Consumer Healthcare and Beam Suntory. In 2022, he literally wrote the book on “Inclusive Marketing.”