Even with some unscrupulous publishers, negligent networks and careless agencies, brands can have as much safety as they are willing to pay for, writes Dan de Sybel, director of technology and operations, Infectious Media.

The drive towards more transparency in online advertising has revealed an ugly truth. There is a lot of bad quality inventory out there and many big name advertisers are appearing on it. How have we come to this, why is it so prevalent and why does it feel like so little is being done about it?

Getting an ad placement up on a new website is often as easy as signing up to an exchange or network, downloading a tag and placing it on your site. Some exchanges/networks will vet the site first and classify the content, but others do not. Even for those that do, there is nothing stopping an unscrupulous website owner from changing the content post vetting or simply putting the vetted ad placement tag on a completely different site.

The rise of user-generated content has exacerbated this issue, as even the most scrupulous owner of a popular website cannot vet each posting to their site before it goes out to the world. Even sites such as Facebook, with the potential to monitor all user postings, face a balancing act between deciding what constitutes unpleasant or non-brand safe content with advocating freedom of speech.

This leads us to a core issue; content that one advertiser considers ‘brand safe’ may not be the same for another advertiser. Understanding an advertiser’s safety limits can involve input from the highest level. Most advertisers do not want to be on porn but are fine with fhm.com. Most do not want to be on overtly political content but are happy to be on the dailymail.co.uk. Being on YouTube and Facebook is generally thought good unless you end up on a page with people beating each other up. These examples highlight the main reason using blacklists and whitelists of sites alone will rarely fulfil an advertiser’s brand safety expectations.

So is this an insurmountable problem? Not at all!

There are very good technologies that can scan a page to categorise its content and determine its brand safety in the blink of an eye (with the exception of sites that illegally stream copyrighted material, which is a bit more involved). If you take the time to understand an advertiser’s brand safety sensitivity profile, you can use one of these solutions to identify non-brand safe content based on the context of the page and block adverts from showing next to it.

This is something that all the major brand safety vendors provide, so why does it still feel like so little is being done? The simple answer is cost. Possibly with good cause, many advertisers see brand safety as the publishers’ and ad tech vendors’ problem, feeling that content should be provided in a brand safe manner, without sacrificing return on investment (ROI). The fall-back position is then blacklists or whitelists, which are ‘free’ in terms of tech costs, but these are blunt tools, over eager to label and then block valuable brand safe content while still missing some of the more nuanced non-brand safe content.

Using a sophisticated brand safety solution as well as doing the groundwork to determine an advertiser’s specific brand safety sensitivity adds to the cost of a campaign, which will always end up coming out of the advertiser’s pocket. Furthermore, most of these brand safety solutions will only work reliably post bid, so the advertiser ends up paying for impressions where their ad is not shown (replaced by either a white box or public service announcement), another cost. While this is better than potentially damaging the brand, when it comes to balancing the desire to be 100% brand safe with that of achieving the best ROI, the latter commonly wins out.

So why are the agencies/networks/trading desks often quiet when they should be championing the use of these solutions? It’s because they know that using a brand safety solution may highlight poor inventory choices on their side, and negatively affect the performance they are measured against. Pandora’s box never looked so menacing.

Times are changing, however. Advertisers are more aware of the options and are becoming more demanding that something needs to be done. They are seeing the benefits of portioning off some of their budget to ensure brand safety and, done right, how this can even improve performance. This in turn lifts the lid on some of the bad quality content that exists and provides agencies/networks/trading desks with the information they need to identify non-brand safe pages to make better inventory purchases. We still have a way to go, but the outlook for a much safer online marketplace is good.

Dan de Sybel, director of technology and operations, Infectious Media