Digital advertising has grown into a vast industry. Thousands of advertisers use advertising networks to publish their ads through millions of publishers. This scale in the ability to reach consumers is nothing short of a miracle, especially for smaller businesses trying to cut through the noise created by their larger competitors. However, thanks to the same scale, there are grave issues concerning all advertisers, regardless of the size of their business or advertising budget.
In this article, we are focusing on one of the most pressing issues faced by digital advertisers- tracking where their ads appear in the digital ecosystem. Why does it matter? Just as a good placement will drive more sales, a bad placement may result in wasted ad budget or worse, it may end up harming your brand’s image.
This flaw in the way the digital ad industry operates has been exposed by a recent report published by Adalytics. According to the report, ads representing some of the biggest, most well-known brands across the globe were found to be hosting on websites that publish and host child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
The irreparable damage to brand reputation in such a case is not difficult to imagine. Thankfully, there’s a lot that advertisers can do to prevent their ads from being published with harmful or illegal content. This guide will walk you through all the steps you can take to protect your brand against such threats.
Let’s start at the beginning:
Step 1: Gain Visibility – Understanding Your Ad Placements
The first step to safeguarding your brand against problematic ad placements is to understand how ad placements are decided. One of the most common ways to publish ads at scale is to use programmatic ad platforms. These platforms, in theory, allow advertisers to precisely target specific audiences at scale, in real time.
However, since programmatic platforms operate using a complex ecosystem of algorithms, supply side platforms, and delivery side platforms, advertisers have extremely limited visibility into their ad placements.
This was evident in the Adalytics report that highlighted big brand names like Amazon, Arizona State University and even US Government Departments like the Office Of Texas Governor were found to be unaware about their ads appearing on a website that would also host CSAM content.
This lack of transparency on programmatic campaigns can be counteracted with the right tool.
One of the best ways to ensure that your ads are placed in a safe environment is by implementing a brand safety monitoring tool. mFilterIt’s PACE solution makes use of real-time monitoring help advertisers get transparency on their ad placements, where it is getting placed to ensure that their brand name is not associated with appraise advertisers about all the brand safety issues that they may be facing, presented through an actionable data points dashboard. The dashboard offers a categorized view of all unsafe content categories, along with risk level and a detailed list of placements on which advertisers can take proactive action to safeguard their interests.
Step 2: Conduct Content Safety Analysis
Once it is clear how ad placements are decided and you have set up the tracking for the same, it is time to ensure your ads are appearing next to contextually relevant content. While programmatic advertising promises the same, the CSAM case has made it clear that the content verification methods of ad networks are incredibly lacking.
Once again, a reliable brand safety tool can prove extremely handy in such a situation. The tool features a Content Safety Analysis feature that is designed to detect harmful content environments that may not be suited to hosting a specific advertiser’s ads. The tool should not just consider safe ad placements but monitor and flag content on the basis of contextuality and relevancy.
Step 3: Check the Website’s Safety Parameters
Next, brands and advertisers must conduct individual website audits to determine whether a publisher is suited to host their ads. These checks are important because in many cases, a website may seem like a safe bet at a glance but may be holding questionable content within its deep pages. The website exposed in the Adalytics report is a good example of the same. At a glance, it seems like a safe image hosting website. However, by monitoring the specific URLs one can identify harmful or illicit content websites like the CSAM content.
To make sure none of your ads appear on a questionable website, analyse the list of websites associated with an advertising platform on the following metrics:
- Website Basics: These include the URLs, titles, meta descriptions, and tags associated with the pages where the ads may appear. While these may seem like rudimentary aspects of website analysis, one may find themselves surprised at how much information these tid bits of a website contain.
- Website History: This one may be familiar to many business owners. Checking the history of the website for instances of blacklisting from an advertising platform is a great way to ensure that the ads are appearing in a reputed publication. To be thorough, it is a good idea to also check for historical instances of policy violations.
- Domain Safety: Advertisers must also give the domain of the publishers a second look to scan for terms that may not align with their brand safety standards.
- Whois Information: The Whois Database is a superb resource to check any website’s hosting details, credibility indicators, and the name(s) of the owner(s). This information can be used in conjunction with the website’s history and basics to make sure that the website in question truly fits within the brand’s safety guidelines.
These checks, when done thoroughly, can do wonders for ensuring your brand’s safety in the ad ecosystem. However, a typical ad network may have thousands of publishers suited to an advertisers targeting needs. Analysing thousands of websites can prove to be cumbersome, to say the least. For such cases, a tool like PACE can be beneficial. It helps advertisers build an exclusion list and ensure that any of their campaigns appear on these websites.
Step 4: Blacklist Unsafe Websites & Optimize Your Inclusion List
Once the analysis is complete, it is time to start taking action. Any websites that may not fit your brand’s safety guidelines must be immediately blacklisted. This way, the most obvious bad actors can be eliminated from your advertising equation.
For websites that produce mixed results from the analysis conducted in the previous step, greylisting can be a good strategy. Greylisting, combined with manual approvals can ensure your ads never appear on a website associated with distasteful or illegal content.
As made apparent by the Adalytics report, brands must update their advertising blacklists routinely and frequently. Think about it, creating a website and signing up with an ad network is a task that doesn’t even take a few hours. Hundreds of new websites are added to ad networks every day.
Unfortunately, updating blacklists is a cumbersome and highly manual task for most advertising teams. Here, mFilterIt’s solution, that enables dynamic updates to blocklists based on predefined parameters and continuous data analysis, can make this task easier without compromising its effectiveness. PACE is also compatible to the culturally diverse countries like India, where the content has language nuances and content may have different meanings in different languages, it is important that a brand safety tool should be able to identify unsafe content in the regional context as well.
Step 5: Implement a Feedback Loop for Continuous Optimization
The final step is also the most important one- creating a feedback loop. This is also the step that almost every brand mentioned in the Adalytics report took as soon as the report was published. Brands like Amazon started demanding stricter verification of websites and continuous ad audits to prevent similar incidents.
With the help of PACE, any brand can create such a mechanism to ensure its safety. A feedback loop can ensure your brand remains safe even from future threats. It is also designed to help advertisers refine their campaign targeting to produce better results.
Conclusion: Take Control of Your Brand’s Safety
The digital ad ecosystem, while being incredibly powerful, is equally dangerous. This is at least true for brands that are not actively taking steps to ensure their safety. Proactive brand managers must start taking action now by auditing their ad placements before their brand is named in a report similar to the one discussed in this article. The Adalytics report has reaffirmed the notion that a passive approach to brand safety in the digital ad ecosystem simply is not effective. To that end, a brand safety solution, like mFilterIt, can help brands:
- Maintain transparency over their ad placements
- Monitor content on publisher websites and webpages in real time
- Easily and effectively blacklist questionable websites
- Holistically protect themselves against unsafe and fraudulent sites with AI-powered analytics and monitoring.
Secure your brand’s digital presence before it’s too late. Book a demo of our brand safety tool today!
