The 'Brand Safety' narrative has been a popular topic in the news and in boardrooms. It's high-time to identify behaviors that your business should change to keep your brand safe, says Dave Sanderson

while accelerating business growth, the digital age has brought to light several other concerns for brands. As we get more digital and globalized, competition is fiercer and customers, far more discerning and less forgiving.

As a brand, companies cannot afford a single misstep. So if there was only one thing you could re-focus time on, then let it be your brand safety.

Google, and its video platform YouTube, recently faced backlash when large accounts realized that their paid content was appearing alongside “hateful, offensive and derogatory content,” costing everyone large amounts of advertising dollars.

While programmatic is every digital marketers’ dream come true in terms of efficiency, it does not come without its downside. Imagine spending all that cash, only to have your ads run alongside offensive content.

Closer to home, Asia-based brands have paused their advertising, with no real pattern to the trend as both multi-nationals and local brands are responding on a market-by-market basis. However, speculation from sources at IPG Mediabrands and ComScore believe that smaller brands are less at risk from brand safety issues due to their smaller budgets, which results in more careful targeting and media spend.

There might be some truth in that as evidenced locally; Singaporean homegrown brands such as Grab and Reebonz seem unaffected. Regionally, however, APAC is seen as having a “lower level of digital sophistication.”

For example, Japan is unphased by the furor surrounding brand safety as online advertising in the country has less emphasis on safety or placement quality. Former Google employee and representative of Sharethrough in Japan, Nori Takahiro, says Japanese online advertising is “two to three years behind schedule” relative to Western markets.

Despite the recent news, however, this is a problem that has existed for quite some time. Perhaps the issue is exacerbated further by the irony that even YouTube’s own marketing content gets served on equally unsavory sites.

How can companies go about resolving this?
Use technical solutions
As mentioned earlier, the problem is not new, and there are already technical solutions that use data science and algorithms to ensure a marketer’s brand safety guidelines are met. Companies like DoubleVerify already provide media agency networks with better brand safety tools.

Remember, safety first
Companies should also ensure that brand safety gets protected from the very beginning. Often, marketing teams adopt a wait-and-see approach once a campaign is launched. However, the minute you launch a campaign is really when you should already be showing due diligence to your data and where your ads appear. When setting up campaigns, safeguards should have already been deployed.

Get close to your data analytics
Very basic housekeeping means paying close attention to your Google Analytics or any other analytics solutions you use. Keeping close tabs on your data will allow you to view the URL and names of the sites showing your ads, so the minute you see a questionable site, action can be taken. Set-up automated reports and review them frequently.

How to re-focus
Before you claim that this is a near impossible task because there are just too many data points to keep track of, bear in mind that companies like Unilever have done it. To date, Unilever has yet to pull any of its UK YouTube advertising out.

In a Q&A session during Advertising Week in Europe, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Keith Weed, said “We haven’t suspended ads here in the UK on YouTube and right now we’re tracking the situation. I’ll make a decision on what to do as and when because we have not yet been affected.”

Today’s business environment demands the highest level of efficiency possible. Companies should review all ad-hoc processes and find a better way of working, automating as many of these as possible.

The biggest gripe many companies have is a lack of resources and time.

This can be easily addressed simply by embracing technology instead of being afraid of it. It’s amazing that manual work still exists in the age of automation. Failure to update outdated processes and maintaining legacy systems is more detrimental to businesses today than it was a few years ago, and the damage is incremental as time passes.

Manual work leads to higher risk of errors, and ad-hoc tasks that don’t get automated are simply a waste of resources. Within the data analytics world where most of these ads lie, data wrangling, cleansing, and Excel spreadsheets should be a thing of the past.

Internal processes should be streamlined and clear so people are free to focus on what really matters — such as strategy and brand safety — as opposed to menial administrative tasks and processes. With the advances in technology in fields such as AI, machine learning, and more, companies really have no excuse to not do so.

One of the best ways to effectively achieve both of the above is to leverage business software that automates labor-intensive processes. At Nugit, we’ve had the privilege of seeing results where streamlining processes such as reporting, has saved companies up to 50% in labor time.

A short survey we conducted found that 8 out of 10 marketers say automating reports provide the easiest way to understand their data, and saves them a lot of time that can be re-focused on other aspects of the business. These resources can be used to analyze which sites are performing well, and which ones could be wasting impressions.

By utilizing technology, tasks can get automated, empowering you to stay on top of critical business issues as they occur, or in best case scenarios, pre-empt them before they need your attention.

“Time is Money” is an adage that holds true even today. As we head into the second quarter of the year, you need to identify behaviors that your business should change and spend more time on brand strategy and brand safety.