Brand Safety Is Indispensable for Video Advertising
The placement of
ads against video content has emerged as one of the most effective marketing
strategies for brands. Placing ads on user-generated videos on platforms such
as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and more, provides brands a much wider
reach than provided by TV and print media. Despite their vast reach, these
social media platforms have their own pitfalls. One of them that is really
damaging for the brands is the difficulty in ensuring brand safety.
The term “Brand Safety” has been used to describe
the controls that companies in the digital advertising supply chain employ to
protect brands against negative impacts on the brand’s consumer reputation associated
with specific types of content, criminal activity, and/or related loss of
return on investment.
It takes years and significant resources
for a brand to build a reputation in the minds of consumers. Even a single less
than desired association can heavily tarnish the brand reputation and the
consumer’s trust.
Most advertisers today are facing ad
placement against unsuitable and potentially harmful content in the following
categories that the global digital advertising industry refers to as the “Dirty
Dozen” categories to avoid - Military conflict, Obscenity, Drugs, Tobacco, Adult,
Arms, Crime, Death/injury, Online piracy, Hate speech, Terrorism, and Spam/harmful
sites.
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| Brand Safety |
Data shows that 1 in 10 ad placements are
against harmful content. According to a survey, about 80% of consumers will stop
or reduce buying products advertised against extreme or violent content and 70%
believe the advertiser and the agency are most responsible for a brand’s ad
placements.
About 10% of all content on YouTube is
brand unsafe. Top unsafe categories on YouTube are violence, adult, extremist, and smoking. In March 2017, YouTube faced massive brand pull for ad placements
against extreme content. In January 2018, YouTube partnered with third-party tools
for brand protection, but in April in the same year, YouTube brand safety woes
resurfaced affecting 300 brands. Google’s estimated loss owing to safety issues
affecting brands reached $1 billion in October 2018. Other social media
platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and TikTok have also faced similar issues
in recent years.
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| In Video Ads |
Despite stringent measures taken by social
media platforms such as keywords, blacklists, and whitelisted channels, safety
flair-ups affecting different brands have been constant across these
platforms. There are certain reasons that have made it difficult to optimally achieve
brand safety on social media platforms without affecting reach and monetization.
The first one is that brand safety is not
one size fits all. Excluding the ‘Dirty Dozen’ categories is not an absolute
rule. Each brand must define its own guidelines for the inappropriate and damaging
context in accordance with its specific needs, values and brand image. Measures
and tools for ensuring online brand protection should be able to provide
required controls to amplify or lower restrictions to allow a highly customized
approach. What is unsafe content for one brand, can be the exact context that
can help another brand reach its most relevant audience.
The second reason is using the keywords
blacklist as the primary solution. This method often fails to understand the
complex undertones and various contexts a single word can be used for. For
example, keywords such as gun, kill, explosion, etc. may be used in a safe
context like in a movie.
Relying on whitelisted channels limits the
true potential offered by social media platforms. Through such channels, brand
reach gets limited and even may not reach the right audience. Using whitelisted
channels is also quite expensive.
Although video advertising majorly uses
programmatic advertising, this approach has a flaw that most brands don’t
really know where their online advertising is running. Even hiring
professionals to screen content to prevent the placement of in-video ads against unsafe
content has not proved to be fully effective as a very large amount of video content
is loaded hour after hour.
Conventional brand safety tools fail to
identify the right context. Artificial intelligence solutions such as computer vision
provide an answer to this problem. Computer vision makes it possible to detect
in-video context with great accuracy, offering unparalleled insight for
advertisers to place context-relevant in-video ads in a highly structured and
safe manner.
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| Computer vision |
For in-video contextual ads targeting, computer
vision enables a high degree of context relevance that surpasses all
limitations of traditional keyword and affinity-based targeting. By using frame
by frame parsing of video content, computer vision technology accurately blocks
ad placements against unwanted, unsuitable, irrelevant and harmful content,
even not letting a single damaging ad placement. Moreover, computer vision
offers a tailored approach to a brand, i.e. it blocks only that content which
is considered unsafe or unwanted by that brand.
Mirrors, by Silverpush, is an innovative contextual
online advertising platform that utilizes computer vision for context-relevant in-video
ad placement. Mirrors Safe is a computer vision powered brand safety and
control platform, developed by Silverpush, that allows a brand to avoid ad
placement against inappropriate or unsafe video content.
Read our latest whitepaper to get a complete view of the current state of brand safety in video advertising and how AI and computer
vision is powering the next-gen tech.
