Brand safety is a massive consideration for European advertisers when they weigh up whether to commit budget to display. After a number of high-profile incidents where branding has appeared alongside inappropriate content, some brands have been reluctant to put marketing spend online.

Organisations like IASH do an excellent job vetting the content of ad networks and other platforms to ensure a brand safety for advertisers and agencies. But with the advent of ad exchanges and RTB, incidents can still occur. Brand protection and verification platforms are now emerging to address these problems.

Adsafe Media, one of the leading companies in the space, took time to speak to ExchangeWire.com last week. Here Kent Wakeford, co-founder and Executive Vice President of AdSafe Media, talks about his company’s platform and how brand safety will encourage more advertisers to put marketing spend into online display:

Can you give an overview of AdSafe’s brand protection and risk management technology?

KW: AdSafe is a content rating platform analyzes web page content and provides brand protection to brand advertisers. The core of our technology is our rating system which uses machine learning and human analysis, informed by over fifty data points, to rate the brand safety of individual web pages on a 0 –1000 scale, with 1000 representing a high degree of brand safety. We provide AdSafe Ratings across multiple content categories for each web page, depending on the level of brand protection desired by our clients. Our platform is customizable to the individual needs of brands, allowing brands to ensure that their advertising always appears in a “brand safe” environment, while still maximizing campaign reach through network and exchange buying platforms.

Our BrandSafe Firewall is an enforcement tool that ensures that the content rating thresholds that brands have chosen and documented on their insertion orders are observed. We utilize a simple ad-call redirect technology, ensuring seamless integration into the brand / agency / network workflow.

Are offerings like the BrandSafe Firewall aimed more at agencies and advertisers? Do you work with publishers and aggregators?

KW: Our BrandSafe Firewall is currently offered to both agencies and brands given that they have the most explicit concern around brand safety. A portion of our clients are brands who are either particularly concerned with protecting their brand equity or are in highly regulated industries with significant non-compliance penalties (such as pharmaceutical). Another segment of our customers are agencies who understand the risk certain content presents to their clients and recognize the need to provide brand protection for the clients.

Our Network Monitor product, offered to ad-networks and publishers, provides monitoring services to indentify problematic web page content. This product allows networks and exchanges to understand which publishers are not complying with their guidelines.

In Q2 of 2010 we will be launching our Publisher Certification Program, aimed at allowing publisher to leverage the benefits of the AdSafe Content Rating system. With this program, publishers will be able to certify the quality of their inventory and will be able to consultatively work with AdSafe to improve the brand safety of their content.

What criteria does AdSafe use when rating the safety of ad inventory for its clients?

KW: When rating publisher content, we look at all the elements on pages including text, images, in / outbound links, host information, as well as many others. Using this methodology, we are able to provide a holistic risk profile of publisher content, allowing brands to choose to appropriate publisher content for the placement of their advertising. Using our rating system, brands are able to select the individual content ratings that suit their needs and strategies. For instance, a consumer product brand may want to prevent their advertising from appearing next to any references of adult content, alcohol or tobacco whereas a more risqué fashion brand may be ok with those types of associations, but choose to avoid and associations with political or hate speech.

Do you think successful brand protection and risk management will result in more marketing spend flowing into online display?

Yes. One of our guiding company beliefs is that only by increasing brand safety for marketers can the industry begin to realize its potential as a key marketing channel. Brand advertisers collectively spend less that 5% of their media budgets online - a level of investment that is completely mismatched with the degree of consumer engagement online. Unless the digital industry develops the same system of checks and balances that support offline media channels, brand advertisers will never have enough confidence in the safety or efficiency of the industry to invest at levels commensurate with consumer engagement.

IASH works closely with ad networks in the UK to ensure the quality of ad network inventory. Does AdSafe partner with similar organization to ensure brand safety for its clients?

KW: We are currently working with IASH in the UK to help networks abide by the guidelines set forth by IASH. In the US, we see the IAB’s recent release of its Standard Terms and Conditions Version 3 as a significant step toward developing the same level transparency and brand safety that IASH is striving for in the UK. We look to the IAB to help define proper interactive advertising policies and will continue to develop our products to help abide by IAB guidelines.

With the advent of impression-level buying, will it be difficult to ensure brand safety in a RTB environment?

KW: No. AdSafe’s Content Rating System can help enable more efficient and responsible real-time-bidding. By using AdSafe’s Content Ratings, buyers and sellers have more insight into the inventory they are buying and selling. Much in the same way a bond’s rating offers a measurement of default risk, AdSafe’s ratings offer a measurement of brand safety – a key criterion when valuing display inventory. In any liquid trading environment, having a consistent metric to communicate the value of an asset is essential. AdSafe is that metric for RTB platforms and is a necessity for the healthy growth of RTB platforms.

Are there plans to launch in the European market in the next twelve months?

KW: We currently have clients and a technology presence in the UK and are planning on rolling out operations to other European markets later in 2010.