Brand Safety: The Importance of Quality Media, Fake News and Staying Vigilant

Recent issues have seen advertisers accused of directly funding, or at minimum not taking sufficient responsibility to avoid funding, socially damaging content including fake news, gang violence and terrorism. No brand plans for their carefully budgeted and planned advertising investment to support such content.

Contextual brand safety is clearly a subjective issue which remains a challenge for many advertisers and ad platforms.

At GroupM, we recognise that there is a brand safety trade-off between risk, cost and performance. We help clients to evaluate their risk tolerance along a sliding scale to weigh varying risk approaches against potential impact on results. Some clients have a high-risk tolerance and others less so. It very much depends on the company and their ethos, or the values espoused by their specific brands.

In my view there are three key topics all marketers, regardless of risk profile, should keep top of mind today. These include:

Quality Media

In this ever-evolving digital world – quality media environments are essential to all aspects of brand safety and ultimately campaign success – and in my view, should be at the very top of advertiser’s priority lists because quality context is second-to-none. We believe “you get what you pay for” and that it’s time to move away from a digital vicious cycle in pursuit of maximum reach or performance at lowest cost without quality control to a digital virtuous circle.

Read the full post at The Drum.