Video Transcript: What Is Brand Safety In Advertising?
Welcome to episode number 74 of The Great Reset. My name is Robert Brill and I'm the CEO of BrillMedia.co. We're an advertising firm that helps companies achieve business results with the best paid media, data, and targeting available in the marketplace.
We drive sales and leads. We're here five days a week talking about marketing and advertising for senior marketing executives, entrepreneurs, and everyone who's looking to grow their company. On today's episode, we'll talk about brand safety as it relates to contextual targeting.
The reason we're connecting contextual targeting and brand safety and some of these other solutions is because the underlying technology that makes contextual targeting work also makes other solutions work. The basic idea is that crawlers, algorithms, and data scientists are used together to create solutions that track activities on a website or app. The same technology helps brands steer into or avoid certain types of content.
And it can also help brands steer away from webpage loads or URLs that are not in line with the brand targeting. Brand safety lets advertisers avoid ad targeting alongside content that would hurt their brand. Typically, brand safety is about preventing ad delivery on adult content, hate speech, and extreme violence.
Most brands would readily agree that ads should not sponsor this type of content because it will hurt the brand. But when you get into a gray area, there are other considerations. A hotel chain, for example, that's running brand advertising in the middle of 2020 may not want to run ads on a news article talking about the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, let's say MGM Casinos is advertising, you might remember that in 2017 there was a terrorist attack in Las Vegas where a man shot at and killed many people from a hotel window during a concert below. If you're advertising MGM Casinos, it doesn't help your persuasive message to bring people to Vegas or to your specific hotel and casino. If your ad appears along a news article talking about how people got killed in Las Vegas.
So MGM Casinos, for example, has the ability to exclude ad targeting on news pages that include keywords for that terrorist event in Vegas in 2017. Another example of how brand safety is deployed is in relation to negative news, negative financial news, general terrorism, and oddly enough, bikinis. It's possible to block a whole category of content for the advertiser.
A bank whose values dictates that their ads shouldn't be seen on negative financial news can easily block ads when ads appear on the category of negative financial news. A clean eating brand, for example, a brand, for example, that talks about fitness and eating healthy, whose primary value proposition is about eating healthy, may want to run ads on pages where there's a woman in a bikini on the beach, such as on a page or domain from TMZ.com. But another brand may not want to be surrounding content where a person, a man or woman, is in bathing, swimming trunks, or a bikini.
There are an infinite way of setting up these tools for brand safety, and a brand can align to exclude mention of certain people or certain products. A common brand safety targeting protocol that is happening in 2020 is excluding advertising on pages about coronavirus. In fact, Business Insider reports that, not surprisingly, there's a spike of consumer attention on pages about coronavirus news.
That's very important to us right now. You may think that this is a larger and more profitable audience for news publications, and you might also imagine that they're earning more revenue because there are more people on these publishers specifically around coronavirus news. But in fact, the opposite is true.
And one of the reasons why this is happening is that many advertisers are blocking keywords related to coronavirus and the COVID-19 pandemic for a number of good reasons. The brands just don't want to be part of the inherently political elements of the conversation. How should we be structuring our coronavirus response?
It inevitably leads towards political outcomes and political motives. The coronavirus coverage is in direct opposition to what the brand is selling. So if you're selling something like a restaurant and you want people to come and eat at your restaurant, it might be challenging to get people to come out of their homes to go eat at a restaurant, even if it's takeout when considering that there are health and safety issues around what you eat and how it's prepared and whether or not safety protocols are covered.
And some brands just don't want to be surrounded by bad news. Now, I'm not speaking for Disney by any means, but typically Disney as a larger brand is really about fantasy and making people feel good and a family-friendly environment. So it's possible that any one of the Disney properties, whether it's Disney World or Disneyland, Disney Plus, any of the Disney Channel properties, may not want to surround advertising or content that speaks to any type of bad news.
And coronavirus certainly is bad news. So, you know, brand safety is really about a combination of factors that allows the brand to really hone in on the places they want to exclude ad targeting from. And it's really powerful for a lot of different brands.
And one of the things that we do when we launch campaigns is we really have the conversation with the advertiser, like what type of content is relevant for you to be on? Obviously, that's part of the targeting procedure, but also what type of content do you not want to be on? And it could be very broad and it could be very narrow.
So that's it for this episode of The Grays Reset. Tomorrow, we will take a look about how contextual targeting helps with viewability and targeting measurement. See you tomorrow.
