Google, and no-one else, Must Take the Blame for Brand Risk

This is an excerpt from a much bigger article available, for free, over at the ever awesome Marketing Week. Check out the full column here.

Two months ago most marketers would have struggled to explain what ‘brand safety’ was, let alone incorporate it into their communications planning. But barely seven weeks later, it has risen from relative anonymity to the very top of the marketing totem pole for almost every major brand on the planet. Like me, you were probably vaguely aware of the original article in The Times that claimed ‘Big brands fund terror through online adverts’ and the subsequent response, particularly of Jaguar Land Rover, which was the first major advertiser to pull all their digital advertising in the UK as a result of brand safety concerns. But things quietened down and the issue appeared to fade from the marketing agenda.

Then, less than two weeks ago, we were confronted with a growing array of bizarrely juxtaposed advertising relationships. It’s hard to know which media placement made the least sense. Was it the idea that Marie Curie was funding and appearing alongside a Neo-Nazi group? Maybe it was the Guardian’s online membership drive being featured on a video for bearded jihadi warriors. Or perhaps it was an ad for Scottish tourism appearing alongside videos for white supremacy. Time and again the most unimpeachable, familiar brands suddenly became associated with unmentionable hate groups.

But what has proven more disarming is the response from most of the marketing community and the fallout from the current brand safety crisis. Increasingly, living in a special digital world detached from consumer reality and unaccustomed to any form of critical assessment, many digital marketers took to social media to point out that this was as much the fault of advertisers as it was the poor unfortunates at Google.

Other, equally dismissive responses to the brand safety scandal acknowledged that the issue was a problem but queried whether it was anything other than a tiny, negligible issue for advertisers. Google EMEA boss Matt Brittin initially tried this line of argument at the Advertising Week Europe conference in London 10 days ago. Brittin apologised for the brand safety issues that Google had created but then observed: “In general I’ve found that it has been a handful of impressions and pennies not pounds.”

It was a line repeated by several other marketers last week with various estimates reducing the proportion of unsafe material to fractions of a decimal point. That jars significantly with independent analysis by Integral Ad Science (IAS), which estimates that around 8% of all digital display advertising and 11% of digital video had the potential for brand risk in H1 2016. That risk (as shown above) is variously made up of content associated with pornography, hate speech, violence and illegal drug consumption. If you listen to the Google apologists the odds of an adverse incident of brand risk appear about the same as a lightning strike. If you believe the IAS report it is more akin to Russian Roulette, and you play the game every time your ad is served. Probably somewhere between these two extremes lies the true proportion, but that’s enough risk to keep even the most cock-sure brand manager awake at night.

Brand safety is not an excuse to beat up Google or a tiny issue that has been exaggerated by media rivals; it’s a massively unacceptable contradiction to corporate social responsibility and the whole notion of purpose-led brand management. The fact that the media will now shine a light on any and all incidences of brand safety certainly exacerbates the issue, but it did not create the crisis in the first place.

Ignoring the excuses then, what does the brand safety saga tell us about advertising in 2017? Despite repeated claims from independent sources that as much as 70% of all money invested in programmatic is going to various ticket punching agency commissions and not to media platforms. Despite estimates that put the proportion of bots being served ads in programmatic somewhere between 3% and 37%. Despite clearly not having a fucking clue where their advertising is going or who their marketing budgets are funding via programmatic media buying. Advertisers continue to invest more and more into programmatic in this country. The ￡2.7bn invested through programmatic in 2016 represented an increase of 44% over the previous year.

The brochures of the brave new world of digital media proclaim real-time efficiencies, artificial intelligence and the ability to engage with consumers globally. But the reality that is emerging from the transparency issue, programmatic murkiness and the growing spectre of brand risk is about as far from this idealistic panacea as its possible to imagine.

This is an excerpt from a much longer column published in Marketing Week, access it for free here.