Give Your Media & Advertising the Health Check-up That it Needs This #ConsciousAdMonth

We all want to have a better & more positive internet, we all want to have more impactful & effective advertising, we all want consumers to be protected & minorities heard, and we all want great entertainment to watch at the end of the day. If you think about your advertising as an investment not just in your brands but also in the health of the internet, what would you do differently?

It’s time to have THE talk. I know it’s a bit awkward, I know everyone thinks they know what they’re doing already, but July is the perfect time to take a moment just to talk about how you could be doing it... well a bit better. It’s Conscious Ad Month after all.

It starts by doing the next right thing. This #ConsciousAdMonth that starts by putting at least an hour in the diary to talk about how you could better control where media spends flow, and what they do or do not fund. Get together with your colleagues, your agencies, your clients, your tech partners, your media owners and anyone else who can make a difference and ask ourselves “Do you want to build a better internet?”.

Exactly the steps you need to take and the questions you should be asking will vary hugely depending on where in the chain you sit and what you’re doing. Many of you are already leading the industry in this regard, but there’s always more we can be doing. You cannot solve everything at once but starting to have the conversations starts to make a difference, if it helps you start then pick just one area and focus on that.

If you’re an agency then why not push for all of your clients to do this? Huge thanks to the several agency groups here in the UK that have already said they will! If you work on the supply side then I’m sure many of you are desperate for brands to make these changes, but think about how you can package that up and make it as easy as possible, the buck doesn’t stop with them.

That’s it, that’s all you need. Stop right now and put the appointment in and let’s all be a bit more conscious about our advertising.

Now then… if you WANT to go a little further and need some specific stimulus on areas where you might be able to do more then read on. This is a DEEP dive so don’t be put off, you can always start somewhere. Even so I’m sure I have missed many key points - feel free to add those in the comments, or shout about the changes you are committing to.

1.      Brand Safety is Dead, Long Live Consumer Safety & Brand Suitability.

I hate to say it but most of us are getting brand safety wrong. Forged in a reactive fire of media scandals, the industry rapidly closed in on a view of brand safety that meant preventing our brands from appearing alongside any sort of controversial content at all costs. This heavily blurred the lines between a couple of different concepts and in doing so created unexpectedly bad motivations, in turn starting to defund quality content & journalism.

A) Consumer Safety - This is the BIG one. Are you spending your money in ways which accidentally endangers society & the consumers you are supposed to serve? That may sound like an overstatement, but I really mean it. Myself and other members of the Conscious Advertising Network (CAN) have been multiple times to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva to discuss exactly why it’s happening.

If your advertising is accidentally funding hate speech, fake news or leaking into ad fraud then you are directly sponsoring racism, terror, climate change denial, anti-vaxxers, and even organised crime. Anywhere you are dealing with a long tail of tens of thousands of sites or content producers there is a risk of this, and you need to ask yourself what you are doing to lock it down now. This is where we must be incredibly careful and explore in detail the settings available to control this. I also encourage you partnering with organisations like CAN to better understand some of the risks and misinformation you may not even be aware of needing to avoid.

B) Brand Suitability - There is no ‘consumer safety’ issue in appearing on the front page of a major newspaper whatever the articles are about. You’re never going to get a dreaded call from a journalist asking what your advertising is funding by appearing on mainstream websites (some possible extremes excluded) providing commentary on tough issues. We do however often over-extend measures to stop the very real consumer risk into these safer spaces, and in doing so create an ultra-conservative view where we cannot appear alongside any discussion. That doesn’t match up with our approaches to content on TV, on the radio, in print or in other spaces.

Now there might well be a suitability issue here: you might be a very family friendly brand that wants to be as far from adult discussions as possible; or a travel brand that never wants to be near a holiday disaster story; or a chocolate brand cautious about appearing alongside dieting stories. These things can look bad, and certainly be laughed at, so please do avoid them... but don’t defund journalism and quality reporting with a list of blocked words that assume being anywhere near the important coverage of topical issues is bad.

If you are a publisher then you need to make this much easier. Take clear decisions to demonetise the most delicate of your content so there is never a chance for advertisers to appear there, and work with GARM and others on clearer labelling of more nuanced areas so brands can apply fair but not blunt considerations.

Action: Talk this through, but if your media buying includes both high quality sites and a longer tail of content providers then I’d definitely consider having a two speed approach to your ‘safety’ settings that starts to play into this important nuance. Tackling hate speech is at the heart of the Conscious Ad Network’s mission and they work with a range of NGOs to explore this nuance and identify future risks for brands to avoid, visit the website for more information.

2 - Ad fraud funds organised crime

Clearly no one wants ad fraud, it’s wasted money that isn’t adding anything positive to your marketing mix. It is however easy to write fraud off as an ‘inevitable’ cost of doing business digitally, and probably just a small percentage that appears on your monthly reporting. If it’s just 2 or 3% does it really matter? It’s not going to have that big an impact on your overall results and you can probably agree to calculate an effective CPM which completely erases the impact from your view.

We are however only a year or two off global digital advertising hitting the $500 Billion mark. 2% of $500 billion is $10 billion pounds. Many experts in this space would point out that the fraudsters tend to be at least two steps ahead of the technology to detect them and many estimates are 5x this figure already. It does vary a lot depending on what and how you buy your media.

Here’s the thing - advertisers rightly pulled spends from YouTube because they found out that far smaller spends were getting into the hands of bad actors. That action drove change in the system and helped lead to substantial platform improvements. I hate to break it to us but the majority of ad fraud goes to bad actors. This isn’t money lost down the back of the sofa that you need someone to refund, this is money that your company is potentially sending directly to organised crime, and evidence would suggest even sophisticated terrorist organisations. It’s up there with the drugs trade and human trafficking in terms of things no one would want to be a part of. For a quick dose of balance, it is fair to say that some forms of ad fraud are likely far less nefarious, caused by misguided bots, genuine errors or people/sites looking to make a cheap buck to up their overall earnings. Some of it clearly is not.

Action: The next time you’re thinking of ad fraud don’t look at it as a small inefficiency, consider it an urgent issue of misfunding. It’s not an inevitability we have to accept, you can vastly reduce the risk with direct partnerships, paying much more close attention to the sites and networks in your list, and insistence of simple standards like ads.txt. Ensure you are at least trying to measure & limit it. Imagine if you renamed ‘ad fraud’ as ‘organised crime funding’ in your reports, that would put some fire under your response. The work of Dr Augustine Fou in this space is particularly enlightening.

3 - Positive Investment in Quality

Your annual health check-up doesn’t just have to look at what ails you, it can really focus in on the proactive opportunities to get even healthier. Digital media and programmatic technologies have been a remarkable leveller in many ways, opening the doors to allow thousands of new voices to be heard, and giving marketers powerful new ways of reaching the right consumers, at the right times in the right places.

I hear that last sentence said a lot, but I see most of the effort go into the first two parts (using data to identify exactly who and when to reach people) and far less consideration for the latter. We’ve embraced a mindset that if we’re getting in front of those right people it doesn’t actually matter exactly where we’re doing it, but I’m here to tell you it REALLY does. As Tom Goodwin once said to me, it’s no use understanding someone is in the market for a high-end luxury hand bag if you then pounce on them in the shopping centre toilet and try and sell them one there.

If you are not careful programmatic buying methods allow the cheapest and nastiest corners of the internet to compete evenly with those publishers trying to produce meaningful content. It’s an inevitable race to the bottom if that continues because even serious publishers will find themselves having to pander to click bait attracting stories with minimal production efforts to balance those books. Forget any high moralistic standards, where would you want your adverts to appear? On TV and in print most of us have high standards around our placements and surrounding content, there is absolutely no reason to believe this doesn’t apply in digital and in fact far more reason than it should (there is very little risky long tail in the world of TV).

The simple truth though is that not all sites are created equally and whilst you may pay a premium to appear alongside higher quality content, I can pretty much guarantee it’s worth it. Also, if we all do a bit more of this, we might just avoid the constitutional crisis that will emerge if we accidentally defund journalism.

Action: Discuss the measures you have in place to prioritise quality over merely reaching people anywhere. Ask for a site list and to understand how many websites you are appearing on, is the 75,439th most popular website in your country somewhere you want to be? If you’re not willing to restrict your whole media buy to high-quality spaces then at least prioritise them for some, and start measuring the impact (you’ll side step safety and fraud issues in the process). Consider the networks and partners you can work with where you know you are funding a better internet and getting a better stage in return.

4 - Attention not Viewability

You may think that inclusion of a viewability metric (how much of an ad was shown on screen for how long) is a solid step forwards in this space, and it’s probably a start. I’m afraid though I again have some more bad news. It’s much easier to build a low quality, click bait site which ticks all the viewability boxes than it is to build a positive consumer experience that does. Celebrity plastic surgery slideshow sites that take up the whole page, offer no scrolling and are so confusing it takes time to work out what is the ‘next page’ arrow and which is an advert? Fantastic viewability. High quality content presented in newsfeed or readable format where you are entirely free to scroll up and down past it and are in fact encouraged to? Bad viewability. Do we really want to force news websites to make us stop at every ad?

If you’re one of the many voices who have rightly championed stricter and greater viewability standards, then I am here to caution you too. Like brand safety, viewability is also an awkward merger of two different concepts. At its heart true viewability is about identifying that there was a genuine chance for a real human being to have seen some of your advert, and that it didn’t load off-screen, behind something else or never appeared at all. The MRC standards for this are relatively low but arguably could be even slightly lower, we’re really just trying to be sure the ad appeared and longer durations and exposures start to factor in complex elements of consumer behaviour and even ad quality – we just want to know that the website did the decent thing and served your ad.

You’re quite right to want more than that of course, and to push that you don’t think that base level of view is an equal trading currency with other media showing greater guaranteed impact, like TV. This isn’t viewability though, this is Attention. Attention can be bigger than pure viewability because it starts to consider screen size & share, longer durations that perhaps have to be earned in part by your content, the quality of context you find yourself in, even the mindset of the consumer and more.

Social platforms tend to have low viewability because of their fast scrolling nature, but because of that behaviour consumers are also very good at taking in and evaluating information very quickly here. They might only see a second or two of your ad but that can be quite a lot of information IF your content is done right. Scroll through your own feed and see if you really need several seconds to evaluate each post within it, it feels like a lifetime. A low viewability score here shouldn’t rule it out but instead trigger a more mature discussion on attention, on big content considerations, and on how such a channel might sit alongside something like TV where you have more time.

Action: Attention is a new and emerging space so start to look at the research and methods being developed. The work of Karen Nelson-Field and the Attention Council springs instantly to mind. Keep measuring viewability but use it more to patrol your long tail of low quality than as a stick to beat quality sites with. Interpret your numbers with nuance and consideration and make them the start not end of the discussion.

5 - Diversity of media as well as content

Marketers are becoming increasingly aware of the impacts their advertising can have in reinforcing or breaking stereotypes. Moving beyond generic gender portrayals, or exclusion of minorities, towards positive inclusion and storytelling in our content is a key challenge to us all. It’s a challenge that applies to our media too.

Those consumer safety settings we talked about are critical to protecting minority communities from hate speech and fake news attacks upon them but the same tools that protect them can accidentally start excluding them too. Many brands have included terms as broad as ‘lesbian’ or ‘muslim’ into their exclusion lists because there is some sense that occasionally content on these topics can be unsafe.

That’s quite an outrageous and offensive thing to say to a large chunk of your audience, and it also starts to defund positive communications about these groups. Research has shown that a majority of positive articles written about the LGBT+ community for instance can be picked up by brand block lists and removed from some media buys. If minority voices cannot get funding they will disappear, and if mainstream titles know they won’t get paid for covering these topics their editorial will stop too

It’s a positive opportunity as well as a watch out. Lean in to the brilliant community of diversity media that is out there. Actively include them in your site lists, or work with network partners who can help you build substantial scale across them. Explore direct partnerships that help you far better understand these audiences and jointly shape bespoke content to reach them, amplify that across your wider media to shatter those stereotypes and as effective stand out advertising.

Actions: Urgently review your keyword lists to ensure you are not using sweeping generalisations in the pursuit of safety, stop calling them ‘black lists’ and ‘white lists’ in the process. Ask your agency to prioritise some diverse media outlets in your buys, or work with networks like Brand Advance who are setup exactly to do this. The voluntary organisation Outvertising has some specific guidelines for media approaches to the LGBT+ community but they’re principles you can apply anywhere. I think they’re great, and not just because I wrote them.

6 - Data and context

As mentioned before digital technologies tend to be very data first and context last. Data is a wonderful thing that opens fantastic creative opportunities, clever timeliness & personalisation, new media optimisations, and big efficiencies, but it’s not always the answer and doesn’t always need to be your starting point.

Say you want to reach an audience of football fans with a cleverly tailored message. Yes, you can cleverly scrape data about their past purchases, browsing history, or even if they went to a game in person this weekend - you’ll identify football fans and be able to reach them just about anywhere with your wonderful content. It’s quite a lot of effort & money wasted on data when you might catch the fan when their mind is on something else entirely, or even someone else is using their computer. A somewhat easier approach here would be to rely on context and to serve your adverts up around sports news, actual game coverage and moments when you know football is on the brain and being actively discouraged. The data folks will point out you out a premium to be in this space, but maybe that’s a better premium to pay than one to ad tech? That’s a discussion to have at least.

Context can be especially important in avoiding some of the bad risks above. A more sophisticated understanding of context will help us better appear in highly relevant spaces whilst avoiding the very adjacent risky ones. It’s also worth considering children’s wellbeing as part of this, if your advert or product isn’t appropriate for younger audiences then don’t just rely on data to avoid them when you can also steer well clear of relevant context.

I am definitely not saying all data is bad, quite the opposite in fact, the challenge is how we use data for good. Rather than starting from an assumption that we need to connect and leverage as much data as possible, let’s look at what we really need and where it really provides benefit & fair exchange to our consumers. There are a lot of changing attitudes towards data privacy and of course sweeping new legislations which are only beginning to be enforced. Marketers don’t just need to compete in a data arms race, they also need to plan for a world where quite possibly we’ll have less data, and things will still be ok.

A base understanding of data ethics and informed consent may sound like something for a human rights lawyer but if you spend your time thinking about what is possible with data then it’s a much-needed balance to have. The question isn’t always ‘what do we have the right to do with data?’, increasingly it needs to be ‘what is the right thing to do with data?’.

Actions: Download the new WFA Data Ethics guide as a strong starting point in this discussion. Challenge your own plans to see where you are layering on excessive data which expensively limits reach when context or broader targeting could do better. Look out for unconscious bias in your data usage that might exclude minorities. On many platforms the benefits of hyper targeting are outweighed by the efficiencies of mass reach - don’t back away from data & targeting but find the right balance for your business. Think about how you would deliver relevance in a world with zero data.

7 - Measure what really matters

Not everyone likes the IAB’s ‘Don’t be a click head’ campaign but personally I love its brutal simplicity. If we wanted an overly simplistic enemy to point the finger at for all these challenges, then blunt digital KPIs would not be a bad place to start. The reduction of media choices to CMPs, CPCs and other dashboard favourites with the erasure of all the good media planning thinking we’d have put into a TV buy is a giant step backwards and not a leap forward.

We are forever telling ourselves how real-time and reactive digital needs to be (and in many cases hugely exaggerate both) and as a result it’s inevitable that we turn to the vast array of digital metrics which are at hand. Waiting to the end of a campaign for slow moving brand research or even slower sales impact studies won’t cut it anymore, we need lightning fast responses to guide our rapid optimisation.

It is of course a wonderful thing that we can do this, and clearly most digital campaigns can in theory be improved by paying close attention to their performance and leaning into it. Is a certain creative performing better or worse? Are certain sites or placements? Certain keywords? The list goes on, and certainly in some areas (eg Search) there is a huge established fine art to this. Much of direct response marketing is built on this nuanced foundation.

As with all your data usage there’s certainly also an ‘is it worth it?’ check to carry out. Is the amount of time you must put into such nuanced optimisation & tweaking worth it versus investing that effort up front in better content, planning or testing? Do these hands-on tweaks actually outperform the results you can get from setting up controlled reach & frequency campaigns, or relying on the tech to optimise. The answer is of course often yes, but not always.

There’s a bigger elephant in the room though and that’s the fact that the vast majority of quick & easy to measure digital metrics do not actually directly drive, or often even correlate with, actual brand or business results. You might think yourself incredibly clever to run several different creative executions on a social network and then rapidly optimise your media around the best performing, but how do you define that? There is plenty of evidence to show that engagement & clicks do not correlate with business outcomes for brand building companies so 9 times out of 10 these clever optimisations are being carried out on meaningless metrics. It’s optimising your TV campaigns based on the brand of TV consumers are using, or your Out of Home campaigns based on the price of the bus fair that day.

That’s being a little bit facetious of course because clearly there is some alignment between digital metrics and results but, certainly in brand building, rarely the connection you think. More passive measures, including those around attention like view through rates as mentioned before, can have a stronger connection but ultimately it’s hard to find real time metrics that show true impact and not just ‘click ability’.

You almost never hear this discussed. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a presentation in which someone dares to point out that optimisation to real time digital metrics is anything other than the clear ideal future of advertising. I would sound hugely regressive if I now said that maybe the best way of measuring the impact of a digital campaign is in slightly slow-moving research that takes place days or months after it has run. You’d all have to disown me.

There’s a middle path of course, thankfully. More advanced approaches to pre-testing, brand lift & view through analysis done early in a campaign, the introduction of broader attention metrics, and others. Even sticking with the KPIs you have but layering on a more nuanced discussion of what is driving them, what the underlying factors are and why it might be ok for example for costs to go up if we know it’s because we’re paying for something worthwhile. I also encourage companies to invest in learning agendas which start to better show which easily measurable metrics do show better correlation to their long-term business metrics, and to identify those which are best avoided.

Action: Have a real think about your KPIs and how you can evolve these based on the different tasks at hand. Educate yourself and your teams on the kinds of conversations such measures should spark as they are rarely black & white. Make a learning plan to work out what metrics actually move your business, and in doing so how you’ll prove out a lot of the above challenges around quality.

---------------------------------------------

One of the mysterious words we use in digital media is ‘transparency’ - in short it’s about understanding where our money is going, what it’s paying for, and where our ads are appearing. These steps ultimately mean you are pushing for more transparency and understanding in this space, and transparency equips you to be able to make more conscious choices. You can decide for yourself which metrics, which ad tech, which data, which placements etc are working for you and worth their cost and which are not. You may decide that investing in a better internet is the right thing to do for your brands & your consumers or you may not. It is however our responsibility as marketers to have this transparency and to make that decision consciously, not to delegate and to make it accidentally.

Please go ahead and put that meeting in the diary - I would love to hear (publicly or privately) from those who do and any changes or opportunities they spark. If you want to take the commitment even further then come find out about the 6 manifestos of the Conscious Advertising Network and how you can sign up, for free, to make a public commitment to them.