The Building Blocks of Brand Safety

To protect brand image and reputation, advertisers naturally want to align with content that reflects positively on their brand and therefore display their ads among content that they consider safe.

Publishers used to place ads ROS, but as measurement vendors have spun up to inform the buy side of brand safety violations, effective campaign delivery has become more and more difficult. 

While vendors measure for the buy side and report % brand unsafe, they do not tell publishers where or why violations happen– leaving publishers without a clear path to make corrections or categorize safe vs. unsafe content. 

Optimera has a solution for the sell side.

Optimera analyzes every page view for every user in real time — including internal and third-party dynamic content modules, identifying pages, terms, modules, and sometimes even code that causes violations. 

What have we found? Article and page content is often not the violator. 

Optimera’s Brand Safety product comes in three pieces:

  • 1. Audit – reveals how measurement vendors categorize your content, whether that content is monitored or blocked for brand safety concerns, and where specific keyword violations happen. Your content is often not the violator! Content recommenders, page code, photo credits, hamburger menus and more have caused measurement vendors to categorize your content as unsafe. With this information publishers are empowered to make site changes.
  • 2. Campaign Optimization with an advertiser block list – Gives publishers the ability to customize campaign delivery based on specific advertiser requests. Optimera ingests blocklists of any length, creates a key value that is passed to inform the ad platform to only deliver when brand safety KPIs will be met.

In this example, a news publishers launched a campaign and the brand’s measurement vendor indicated that delivery was only 23% brand safe. The publisher provided Optimera with the key word blocklist, Optimera created a key value and after applying it, the campaign measured 95% brand safe.

3. Campaign Optimization with the Universal Unsafe List – Begin all Direct Sold and Programmatic Deals by eliminating the content that all advertisers agree is unsafe. Having worked with dozens of publishers to deliver hundreds of brand safe campaigns, we know the common words that all brands deem unsafe. Begin all of your relationship based campaigns by avoiding content that includes these violators.

Optimera’s technology gives publishers the ability to decipher safe from unsafe content, know where violations happen, and in turn deliver campaigns that third party vendors measure as safe. With this transparency and knowledge publishers can also be mindful of brand safety as they continue to create excellent content.