What's The ROI of Brand Safety?
Which is more embarrassing for you as a marketer?
1) being shown a screen shot of your digital ads running on a porn site, hate site, child abuse site, piracy site, disinformation site, or fake news site?
Or
2) getting called into the CEO’s office, with the CFO present, and shown documentation that you’ve systematically funded porn sites, hate sites, child abuse sites, piracy sites, disinformation sites, and fake news sites for years with your digital ad dollars?
You’re certainly getting fired for one of the above and you’re certainly losing your digital ad budget too. Do you want to wait until either of the above happens, or do you want to take a closer look now, before these happen? Think “Check My Ads”
Brand Safety and Brand Suitability Are Both B.S.
No, I don’t mean the acronym - BS. I mean the way industry trade associations are talking about it and ad tech vendors are selling you solutions for it. If you buy media through programmatic ad tech and have your ads sprayed out across hundreds of thousands of sites, do you think brand safety technology can detect your way out of trouble? Consider the fact that real terrorists are going to use the word “bread” instead of the word “bomb” in their communications, so the tech won’t actually catch the real terrorists. Consider the fact that parties intent on spreading disinformation can type the text inside a picture and get by all text scanners -- think memes.
https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/brand-safety-gone-mad-bad-just-plain-wrong-ad-fraud-historian/
And consider the fact that despite press releases and sales materials that drop every acronym like AI, ML, semantic engine, etc. the BS tech is still no better than a blunt instrument looking for keywords on the page. (Note the recent oopsies where these tech platforms defunded real news sites, because they covered the news on the coronavirus and “Black Lives Matter.”) And they failed to catch and prevent ads from going to the actual bad sites. And YOU paid for the BS tech.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/fake-local-news-sites-albany-edmonton
Go right ahead if you want to continue deluding yourself and paying for BS tech. I won’t rag on the swag either... because it does say BS on it. But I’m sure you will hang the plaque on the wall and wear the scarf out to social gatherings.
Real Marketers Don't Pay for BS
Real marketers check their ads instead. They spend their digital ad dollars wisely to drive real business outcomes. They keep their ad dollars away from porn sites, hate sites, child abuse sites, piracy sites, disinformation sites, and fake news sites. Having the right data to look at (e.g. detailed placement reports) and taking the appropriate action -- turning those domains off -- will not only stop the funding of bad faith sites it will also ensure the ad dollars go to real publishers' sites and ads are shown to real humans.
?So what's the ROI of brand safety?
What's the ROI of paying for BS tech when the tech is actually BS. It's negative.
What's the ROI of not stopping your ads from systematically funding bad sites? It's negative infinity.
Most importantly, what's the ROI of you keeping your job? That should be really easy to calculate. It's positive infinity.