Safeguard Your Brand Interview with the ANA (Association of National Advertisers)

Original Article found here. https://www.ana.net/miccontent/show/id/ii-2017-11-newsstand-safeguard-your-brand

Safeguard Your Brand

Trust Metrics CEO Marc Goldberg on avoiding bad ad placements

By Ken Beaulieu

Few advertisers would argue with the positive impact programmatic buying has had on the industry, from providing greater targeting and reach to delivering real-time measurement to yielding endless data. By 2019, eMarketer predicts that nearly 84 percent of U.S digital display ad dollars will transact programmatically.

But for all its benefits, the automation of ad buying has resulted in one significant downside for many brands: unintended placements next to objectionable content or on fake news sites. Such placements can damage a brand’s reputation and value with remarkable speed, affecting both customer loyalty and the bottom line.

Not surprisingly, brand safety has become a top-of-mind issue among marketers, especially as it relates to the growth of online ad retargeting. So how can brands protect themselves from being associated with inappropriate or questionable content? For perspective, the ANA reached out to Marc Goldberg, CEO at Trust Metrics, a brand safety planning tool that provides brands with transparent insight into buying programmatic inventory.

Q. What preventative measures can brands take in their retargeting efforts to avoid being in the news for a bad ad placement?

A. While there is value in following your audience to ensure they recognize your brand, our increased engagement with social media has brought about new risks and challenges. In the past, users primarily arrived at sites via direct navigation or through search with specific intent. Now, we use social media as a discovery tool, clicking on headlines that appeal to us on sites we never would have otherwise gone to. With fake news and clickbait being a constant issue throughout social, it’s very likely users will end up on a domain they don’t know or that doesn’t meet normal quality standards. A retargeting ad here from a reputable brand almost implies that the site is trustworthy, which can be very dangerous. So, when a vendor tells you, “It’s all right, you are capturing users where they want to be,” rethink that statement.

Q. Can’t brands just layer on a blacklist with their retargeting efforts?

A. That’s certainly a step in the right direction, but is ultimately insufficient in solving your problem. We often liken blacklists to a game of Whac-A-Mole; each time a site is called out on a blacklist, five new ones pop up in its place to steal your ad dollars. This is especially true with fake news sites, which have been a huge problem over the past year. These sites are created overnight with the intention to confuse, shock, and persuade — all while eating away at your spend. While the universe of bad sites is endless and constantly evolving, the number of good-quality, relevant publishers remains fairly stagnant, so a whitelist is the only surefire way to steer clear of problems.

Q. Don’t whitelists limit scale and restrict inventory?

A. A whitelist will reduce the number of sites you run on and may affect various KPIs, but the numbers brands have grown accustomed to have been padded by fraudulent publishing and bot traffic. At a recent conference, JPMorgan Chase explained how they reduced the number of sites they were running on from over 400,000 to just around 5,000 without noticing any impact on reach. Sure, the number of total impressions will go down when cutting a list that drastically, but the number of quality impressions will remain the same. Once a brand has a whitelist that works, it’s much easier to focus on creative and optimizing spend. Working with a set whitelist from the start of a campaign has the added benefit of shrinking your universe and making it easy to track other risks, such as domain spoofing, which can lead to even more efficiency through makegoods.

Q. Doesn’t Ads.txt, introduced this past summer by the IAB Tech Lab, address the problem of domain spoofing?

A. The idea with Ads.txt is that it will bring transparency into the supply chain and prevent illegitimate sellers. In theory, this is a great concept and we sincerely hope it catches on. However, for the time being, there are quality and safety issues among the Ad.txt ecosystem, including fake news and copyright infringement. Of the 12,000-plus domains currently using Ads.txt, we consider just over 2,000 domains to be appropriate for most advertisers (16.67 percent). We think advertisers and agencies should be telling their partners to implement Ads.txt, but they need to layer a whitelist and security vendor to be best in class.

Q. Why the security vendor too? A common discussion among advertisers is to lower non-working media costs.

A. Non-working media costs are necessary to make your media work. Even major media sites will have bot activity, knowingly or unknowingly. The safest publishers will have content that may make certain brands squeamish from time to time. If your team just wants to bake non-human traffic in as “the cost of doing business,” the bad guys will continue to flood supply with more impressions and good guys will try to keep up with lower rates by placing more ads on a page. This will annoy real users and lead to increased ad blocking, which ends poorly for everyone. Advertisers can impact change, and I applaud the few that have already been outspoken. The advertisers that ignore the problem are too focused on the short term and are postponing the industry’s ability to build real solutions.

Q. What are your recommendations?

A. Here are five that brands should consider:

·      The supply side is not going to change on their own, but brands have the ability to change them by setting expectations and guidelines. I love that Chase and P&G have been outspoken about the positive effects of whitelisting and I hope other brands will follow suit.

·      If you’re not having these discussions about safety and fraud today, you need to have them soon with any party that gets a portion of your ad spend. Programmatic and digital is not as easy as promised, but if buyers don’t implement best practices, they will either find themselves in the news for all the wrong reasons or simply waste money.

·      Publisher credibility and site quality is something that consumers care about; marketers need to start caring a little more about this.

·      Fraud will never be at zero, but we can do everything we can do avoid publishers and domains that are majority fraud.

·      Get your impression logs audited. For example, Trust Metrics will for free show you where you’ve run, where your money is being well spent (and wasted), and identify potential problems before they land you in the news.

Original Article HERE

https://www.ana.net/miccontent/show/id/ii-2017-11-newsstand-safeguard-your-brand