Trust, reputation, review, and recommendations play a critical role among consumers today, during any decision-making process. Whether it’s a gadget, apparel, or home decor, customers want to purchase from a reputed brand. Thus, brands invest significant budget and workforce to ensure their image and reputation are built and safeguarded at all times.
The public's overall perception of a brand is forged over a period based on the brand’s values, messaging, reviews, and the customer’s interactions and experiences with the brand. The brand image focuses on the messages a business intends to convey through marketing, design, and communication efforts. Brand reputation reflects trustworthiness, ethics, reliability, and the quality of their products or services.
Advertising plays a key role in making or breaking a brand’s image and reputation. The messaging and creatives floated by brands through their ads are a direct reflection of their ideas and values. So, the ads a brand creates and where it chooses to place them have a crucial impact on consumer perception. For example, a children's toy company running ads on a website or article that features explicit language or violent content can negatively impact how they are perceived. Similarly, a brand that sells vitamins or fitness products placing ads on a platform that promotes unhealthy lifestyle choices and dangerous behaviors such as extreme dieting or risky physical activities, it goes against its fundamental values.
Brand safety: The need of the hour
Today, there is an ever-increasing need to be mindful of the advertising content created and where they are showcased, making way for the implementation of brand safety and suitability measures. These advertising practices aim to shield a brand's image and reputation from being negatively impacted by online advertising placements. The focus lies in making sure brand ads do not show up next to content that could be considered harmful or inappropriate.
Various factors pose a threat to brand safety in today’s digital landscape:
- Placing ads in inappropriate or controversial contexts
- Ad placement alongside unrelated or conflicting content
- Brand presence besides fake news or misinformation
- Losing precious advertising dollars to ad fraud on dubious websites set up to generate false clicks
- Data breaches or data privacy violations of precious consumer information
Whether it is social media or the web universe, ad placement plays a critical role in ensuring brands avoid potential damage to their image, maintain trust with consumers, and build their reputation.
The deprecation of third-party cookies has already put contextual advertising as a front runner in the digital landscape. However, contextual AI’s ability to ensure the highest levels of brand safety and suitability is another reason that makes contextual ads an ideal alternative to cookie-based advertising practices.
The spotlight on brand safety and brand suitability
Contextual advertising relies on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to deliver ads on relevant websites that target relevant audiences without the use of cookies. Contextual advertising’s Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities go a step further and have the ability to understand nuances in language and semantically interpret editorial content.
By analyzing the written and visual content of a page, contextual advertising offers brands an environment where the values and ideas seamlessly fit with their image and values, thus ensuring the highest levels of brand safety. Additionally, brand suitability helps bridge the divide between risk and opportunity and provides context-based protections.
The merge of brand safety and suitability helps brands elevate their targeting strategy. It helps as it:
- Shields your brand image and reputation from any negative impact
- Prevents your ads from appearing alongside harmful or inappropriate content
- Aligns ad placement with content that reflects brand identity and values
- Places ads where they resonate with the right audience
With brand safety and suitability, brands can navigate tricky spaces where there is a risk of exposure to controversial and harmful content. For instance, a website that focuses on financial news might cover some topics that brands might deem unsafe. However, websites that cover topics like finance or the stock market might be a great bet for a luxury watch brand. Therefore, strategic ad placement plays an important role in maximizing opportunity and impact.
As we venture into the future of digital marketing, the combination of brand safety and suitability emerges as a guiding light for brands seeking to safeguard their reputation while maximizing their reach. By embracing contextual advertising and its contextual AI capabilities, brands can confidently navigate the complexities of online advertising, secure in the knowledge that their message is not just heard, but heard in the right place, at the right time, by the right audience.
Interested to learn more about contextual advertising and brand safety?
Brand Safety & Brand Suitability
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