Wout Van Damme the CEO of Funbox, a multi-channel performance trading desk, discusses how technology is only as good as the people using it and says that trading desks are ultimately responsible for advertisers brand safety. He also talks about Funbox's strict processes and protocols and how these ensure advertiser's brand safety.

We have seen a lot of media coverage around brand safety on ad exchanges recently and the reality is that there are risks involved with running campaigns on exchanges and DSP’s. This should however not discourage advertisers from running on exchanges, as the good news though is that these risks can be mitigated.

Let's first look at what the challenges are in terms of brand safety. A decent percent of internet traffic is  torrent related or holds otherwise unwanted content and the reality is that these sites do find a way onto exchanges. Some exchanges police this to the best of their capabilities and some don't police this at all. Without proper targeting it is possible ads will run on these sites. Avoiding these categories is an obvious choice, but publishers or networks might accidentally or deliberately misclassify a site and for example classify a torrent site as a technology site. The other issue with classification is that an exchange, publisher or network all might have different ideas as to what brand safe is, from what you or your client might think.

User generated content sites also pose a potential threat to brand safety. Some UGC sites allow users to upload ad serving code. We have found instances of misuse of these UGC sites, where an ad tag is uploaded onto a UGC site (for example - blogging platforms) which are then served out on iFrames on non-brand-safe sites. To the eyes of the advertiser tracking the impressions, it would appear that the ad is serving on the ostensibly brand-safe UGC site, and not a non-brand-safe site.

These are all potential risks that have to be dealt with and in my opinion a trading desk should take responsibility for the brand safety of their campaigns. Yes, everyone down the line should contribute including exchanges, DSPs, networks, publishers and brand safety platforms, but ultimately the trading desk should understand the client’s needs and make the right campaign strategy, technology and procedural choices to ensure the client needs are being met.

Things are not always what they seem and it is crucial to check and cross check everything you do. We estimate that about 30% of the resources of our display team are dedicated to our brand safety activities. To ensure brand safety we rely on four pillars.

The first pillar is based on white listing; depending on the level of brand safety required we will manually vet each site we target.  Thousands of sites have been vetted by an internal compliance team and we continuously train our team members to keep improving their skills and keep them abreast of the latest developments. As an alternative to white listing, we use semantical brand safety tools which will verify content on a page level if the advertiser is comfortable with this solution. Although these kind of solutions provide a level of brand safety, we don’t necessarily agree with what their brand safety classification is. The advantage of the semantical brand safety tools over manual vetting is that it is more scalable, and unless there is solid capacity to manually vet sites, then reach can be an issue. Brand safety and reach have to be weighed up when determining the right campaign strategy.

Secondly, when using white lists, we double white list our sites in a third party site verification platform. This means that in addition to targeting the white list in our ad servers we also white list the sites in the site verification platform and if the tags land on a site outside of the white list, the ad will not be served.

Thirdly, we have developed a proprietary brand safety platform which allows us to see in near real time where the ads are and increases our visibility in the whole daisy chain. We can see up to 10 iFrames deep, were site verification platforms generally go to 3 iFrames deep. The third party site verification platforms block in real time, but reporting is 24-48 hours delayed, our platform gives us a near real time view into what is actually happening and allows us to respond much faster if needed. It also facilitates in the vetting and management of sites lists.

Lastly, the technology is only as good as the people using it, so we operate using strict procedures, use check lists extensively and use the two-pair of eyes principle where campaign managers check each other’s campaigns before going live.
In the end, the nature of the internet is such that we will always have to watch the traffic closely and that there is no out-of-the-box (technology) solution to completely cover brand safety.  Ultimately, our brand safety approach is that we don't trust anyone and will check everything and anyone to safe guard our clients interest.

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