But it could also “accelerate” adoption of ad-supported connected TV channels – and, with it, of ad fraud that might creep in.
That is according to an ad-tech exec who sees a need emerging for technology solutions to address the growth.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Tony Marlow, chief marketer at Integral Ad Science (IAS), offers his views.
Our research at @integralads shows that free #streaming content is growing at more than twice the rate of subscription content. People’s appetite for free content has exploded in the #CTV space. Great to see IAS included in @xpangler's @Variety piece! https://t.co/L5fWGnu3nL
— Tony Marlow (@tonytonymarlow) April 22, 2020
“People seem fairly capped out on subscription connected television and where we’re seeing the growth come from under these quarantined scenarios is from free and ad supported connected TV,” Marlow says.
“What comes next? I think the current situation is going to be a game-changer for connected TV and ad-supported connected TV.
“One of the things that we’ve learned over the years in the business that we’re in is, essentially, where consumer eyeballs go, ad dollars quickly follow – and where the ad dollars go, fraudsters quickly follow.
“So, now and into the near future, we expect an uptick in fraud in these ad-supported CTV environments, particularly as CTV inventory goes increasingly programmatic. Our new normal has changed people’s behaviours and that’s going to have a domino effect.”
WFH? Watching a LOT more TV? You're not alone… find out more about the impact of #StayHome measures on CTV consumption with new research from IAS. https://t.co/xEhwh8rgzC pic.twitter.com/5gvA9Ht4IX
— Integral Ad Science (@integralads) April 7, 2020
Ad fraud has plagued programmatic display ads. Numbers on its emergence in connected TV or over-the-top TV are harder to come by, likely suggesting the threat is nascent, though some have tried estimating.
For now, IAS’ Marlow says advertisers need to recalibrate their understanding of “brand safety” and how that pertains to ad buying.
He says the use by advertisers, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, of brand safety software’s keyword blocking lists, through which ad buyers could swerve around news stories containing “coronavirus”, was not the right approach. So he is advocating a more nuanced focus on “brand suitability”>
“There’s a fairly universal understanding of what are those unsavoury environments that most brands would not want to be near … terrorist content or adult content,” Marlow says.
“But brand suitability, that’s where we get to what’s right for a specific brand, those environments that are going to drive performance and are appropriate for a given brand.”
Although many advertisers actively avoided coronavirus news like, well, the plague, believing that adjacency would breed negative sentiment amongst audiences, even early in the pandemic, there was research around which showed the opposite.
An April study conducted by Integral Ad Science (IAS) found:
IAS’ Marlow says the belief that coronavirus was not “brand-safe’ was a big “misconception”.
“Keywords can be one part of a holistic brand safety and brand suitability strategy, but they are not the strategy itself,” he says.
“Blocking on terms like ‘coronavirus’ may not actually be the most appropriate course of action for you and your brand.
“It’s critical to have a healthy, independent news environment that’s available and freely available to all.”
This video is part of a series titled Brand Suitability at the Forefront, presented by Integral Ad Science. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But a shocking new report published during the pandemic has given them even more reason to scrutinize programmatic ad-buying supply chains.
According to the report by ISBA, the trade body for UK advertisers, the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) and auditor PwC, 15% of advertiser spend could not be attributed, whilst publishers receive only 51% of advertiser spend on average.
The figures have been described as “mind-boggling” – especially several years after earlier industry reports first raised the problems around “ad tax” and transparency.
For Will Luttrell, it all points to the ongoing need for a supply chain clean-up.
“We are more busy now than we ever have been,” says the founder of Amino Payments, a company working to improve transparency.
Luttrell was previously the co-founder and CTO of Integral Ad Science (IAS), the advertising brand safety software vendor.
He founded Amino to “lift the shroud from the media supply chain and eliminate fraud, waste, and abuse, making the entire industry more transparent and cost-effective”.
Accountability for each and every dollar spent on digital marketing is more important now than ever. We’re thrilled to partner with @integralads to provide advertisers with Total Visibility into the cost and quality of their media. https://t.co/8ewdT90Q2T
— Will Luttrell (@will_luttrell) April 29, 2020
But IAS and Amino were re-united this April, as the pair announced Total Visibility, an initiative through which IAS customers will get to benefit from Amino’s approach.
The aim is to show advertisers the true cost of qualified media by giving them both impression-level financial insights and media quality verification to optimize campaigns in real-time.
It employs a single tag that collects IAS data, supply path data and financial data, aiming to provide a more accurate cost of inventory and the best supply paths for viewable, safe ads.
In doing so, Total Visibility claims to save advertisers 10% to 15% on their media spend, by buying better inventory. The system is in use by Nestle and HP.
We are proud of our ongoing work with @Nestle, an innovator in digital media transparency.
Read more about how Amino fits into their Global Digital Media Center of Competencies initiative: https://t.co/m5rLb8OE5t
— Amino Payments (@aminopay) November 13, 2019
“We have seen strong value for both the buy side and the sell side. However, the buy side is currently our main customer target at the moment,” Luttrell says of the initiative.
“When buyers are willing to move money towards transparent supply paths, that’s when the industry moves.
Amino Payment’s feature set includes Lens, which records media spending in a digital ledger, and Pay, which uses “smart contract” technology to enforce agreements between parties.
This video is part of a series titled Brand Suitability at the Forefront, presented by Integral Ad Science. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That’s the view of a specialist programmatic ad adviser to the advertising community.
Early in the pandemic, it became clear that a large number of advertisers were using brand safety tools’ keyword blacklist features to simply ignore advertising against stories deemed to be about the virus, believing it to be a negative association.
Much research has since found readers are actually craving virus news and don’t think negatively of brands that place next to it.
The shock of the pandemic means there are more people online than ever, using #digital platforms in ways they've never used them before. Listen as we discuss what this means for advertisers as they get to grips with the new normal. https://t.co/pGlIGjJFnu #Programmaticadvertising pic.twitter.com/BxAvizdtwF
— wearemiq (@wearemiq) May 26, 2020
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Gurman Hundal, co-founder and CEO of MiQ, says: “I think the responsibility there is on the buy side.
“The job of a news publisher is to create content that engages the user and ultimately the user then spends time on that website and that becomes a value that the buyer gets – they get a volume of users who are engaged.
“But then the buyer must – with their service provider, the agency or the managed service programmatic player that’s helping them on that campaign – be involved in setting the criteria of what they deem appropriate for their brand.
“The technology exists. They can add all the parameters. That needs to be added from the buy side before you even go live with the campaign. And then that ultimately adds the protection for the actual advertiser.”
“Brand safety” concerns reared their head several years ago when many brands discovered their automatically-bought ads were appearing next to unsavoury content.
But now some of the tools designed to mitigate that are also being used for some seemingly-odd goals. Many brands are choosing not to appear against some of the most-consumed news content in years.
Now many in the industry are trying to reach a more refined understanding of “brand safety”, to accept that news is fundamentally safe but that particular kinds of news need accurate, granular descriptions in buying platforms.
Hundal says: “The technology exists to make sure that protection for the brand is there. The brand and their service partners need to put the work in to understand, ‘Okay, what criteria do we need to set that gives us a safety there?’, but the tech’s there to do that and ultimately it’s down to the buy side.”
This video is part of a series titled Brand Suitability at the Forefront, presented by Integral Ad Science. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But one of the world’s largest ad agency groups is now the latest to say they don’t need to skirt news.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Yale Cohen, EVP of digital investment and standards at Publicis Groupe’s PMX, the Publicis Media Exchange, says keyword lists are crude, news inventory is effective and new semantic analysis tools can make it even more so.
U.S. Ad Market Plummets 35% In April, Second Consecutive Month Of Faltering Demand: Ad demand fell 35% year-over-year in April, marking its lowest point since MediaPost and Standard… https://t.co/JHlO94rH1y @mp_joemandese
— Digital Content Next (@DCNorg) May 21, 2020
“Brands should really try not to avoid news. It’s a safe, engaging environment,” Cohen says.
“We’ve definitely seen performance in news, it’s very engaging. You see the same type of opinions, controversy, debate in our political sphere in and around coronavirus. It’s definitely an area a client should not be avoiding.”
Recent Integral Ad Science (IAS) research suggests keyword blocking of COVID-19 terms by ad buyers has been reduced by 88% – but not before advertiser behavior tore through publishers’ ad revenue.
Now many newsrooms are bloodied in red ink, the victims of a dichotomy – audience traffic is booming, but monetization opportunities have slimmed, and ad rates are getting pushed down in pursuit of dollars.
“There’s a few myths about what the capabilities of keywords are,” Publicis’ Cohen adds. “In most cases, it’s just controls and settings for the URL and not the actual content of the article.
“We’ve always recommended that advertisers take a nuanced approach for their specific brands to keywords. The idea of having a list that is 3,000 keywords long, it doesn’t take into account the semantic analysis and the innovation that’s happened in the last year.”
He is talking about semantic analysis, a branch of machine learning that can return several indicators about the real context and intent inside content, beyond one-dimensional descriptive keywords.
Several ad-tech vendors are now offering such tools to publishers, with which to offer the more “nuanced” buying signals Cohen is talking about. He thinks it is a game-changer.
“It sets you apart, being able to show up in areas where there could be positive stories around certain topics that you may think were negative based on the keywords,” Cohen says.
This situation is not one where either ‘more’ or ‘less’ keyword blocking should be universally adopted as the only protective measure, it is one that highlights the need for precision in guiding a brand toward or away from content corresponding with that brand’s values & identity pic.twitter.com/TnuPI08Wh6
— Integral Ad Science (@integralads) March 18, 2020
Decisions to swerve certain news stories are often made under the guise of “brand safety” concerns. Many brands have believed consumers would look negatively on them for virus adjacency.
But, even early in the pandemic, there was research around which showed the opposite – far from reacting negatively, many consumers were increasingly seeking out coronavirus information from news organizations and from brands.
The semantic technology has the potential to reboot those “brand safety” concerns, which first emerged a few years ago, when brands discovered their ads running accidentally against alarming content.
Now, more in the industry are declaring all news is intrinsically “safe”, they are searching to establishing which individual pieces of content are “suitable”.
“We can all agree that news is brand-safe,” says Publicis’ Cohen. “It’s the suitability of the content (that matters). There are sophisticated tools that clients have at their fingertips and really we should invest responsibly.”
This video is part of a series titled Brand Suitability at the Forefront, presented by Integral Ad Science. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But, little by little, organizations seem to be making headway on getting advertisers to reduce one practice – bluntly side-stepping inventory in any news stories about the virus.
Over the last couple of months, an array of bodies, vendors and publishers has tried to make advertisers understand that blithely using brand safety tools’ keyword filters to root out such opportunities isn’t just harmful to news publishers, it can limit their marketing exposure.
And it seems they may be having some success.
“We’ve actually made a difference,” says David Cohen, president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) US.
“If you look at what’s happened over the past two months, when their immediate knee-jerk reaction was to just block the news, we’ve seen that the aperture has opened up by many, agencies, brands, et cetera, which has been great.”
Early in the pandemic, IAB president David Cohen, who had recently joined from IPG’s Magna, published an IAB article, How Brands and Agencies Can Save American Lives in The Coronavirus Crisis.
Publishers’ group Digital Content Next also wrote a letter to marketers and ad verification companies asking them to exempt premium, trusted media companies from COVID-19 brand safety filters.
“For the foreseeable future we will be operating in a unique marketplace, testing the boundaries of supply & demand in a way we haven’t seen before.” @IAB's @mrdcohen via @MediaPost: https://t.co/pts8Vzqn0t Read Ad Revenue & Pricing reports: https://t.co/TyocGT2wwb
— IAB (@iab) May 28, 2020
Keeping ad dollars flowing into news is critical. Many news organizations were already facing unfavorable business conditions before the pandemic struck.
Now they find themselves fighting to keep the lights on in their quest to keep reporting the combined events of biggest health emergency in decades, nationwide race riots and an upcoming presidential election.
IAB’s latest full-year advertising revenue report is not pretty:
“Honestly, news is saving lives,” says Cohen, whose IAB represents media companies, brands and technology intermediaries. “Without support of local and national and reputable news, we would all be in a very dire situation.”
His organization has been carrying out an education drive, comprising town hall meetings.
“Obviously we want a healthy, vibrant, ad supported news ecosystem, so it’s good to see that that’s been actually translating to action,” says Cohen, who agrees with others that new software which identifies the semantic meaning of news stories offers an opportunity for advertisers to choose their inventory in more granular detail.
This situation is not one where either ‘more’ or ‘less’ keyword blocking should be universally adopted as the only protective measure, it is one that highlights the need for precision in guiding a brand toward or away from content corresponding with that brand’s values & identity pic.twitter.com/TnuPI08Wh6
— Integral Ad Science (@integralads) March 18, 2020
There are other indicators that the keyword-blocking issue may be abating.
In the last few weeks, Integral Ad Science (IAS), a vendor of brand safety tools, found a 88% decrease in keyword-blocking of COVID-19-related specific keywords.
Like IAB, it has been advising ad buyers against bluntly blocking virus stories – not just to save news publishers, but also because audiences actually don’t mind the adjacency. An April study conducted by Integral Ad Science (IAS) found:
“Every brand needs to have their view of the world and where do they fit on that brand suitability spectrum, and it’s an entirely appropriate conversation to have,” Cohen says.
“In some cases, as it relates to news specifically, we’ve seen that consumers are leaning in and engaged with news now more than ever, that there is no knockoff effect or deleterious effect, there is no bad effect of a brand appearing in news content.
“Much to the contrary, actually … there is a positive association with news and news-related content.”
This video is part of a series titled Brand Suitability at the Forefront, presented by Integral Ad Science. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But they should never have declared news fell outside of “brand safety” descriptions.
That is what a growing number of industry executives, even those who represent the advertisers and agencies, are now coming out to say.
Marla Kaplowitz understands the concern.
“The content that people are experiencing in some ways is really challenging and concerning for some, especially when you’re hearing about deaths related to COVID-19,” says the CEO of 4As, the American Association of Advertising Agencies.
“(But) news is brand-safe. Premium news environments are positive places for brands to be. We know that millennials are going there in higher rates.”
Audience research is piling up that shows advertisers perhaps don’t need to dodge coronavirus news at all. An April study conducted by Integral Ad Science (IAS) found:
Thankfully, advertisers’ view may be softening. In the last few weeks, IAS found a 88% decrease in keyword-blocking of COVID-19-related specific keywords.
Kaplowitz thinks ad agencies have an important role to play in ensuring brands take the right steps.
“It has to be the right channel and the right way to verify that it is appropriate content that is not fake,” she says.
“The most important thing is to make sure that you are hyper focused on ensuring that you’re eliminating fraud, malware, that you’re being brand safe within whatever environments that you are advertising.”
This video is part of a series titled Brand Suitability at the Forefront, presented by Integral Ad Science. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In this video discussion with John Montgomery, GroupM’s Global EVP of Brand Safety, Integral Ad Science (IAS) CEO Lisa Utzschneider reveals new research showing advertisers’ keyword blocking of news stories containing “coronavirus” and “COVID-19” is subsiding.
“In the US, we’ve seen an 88% decrease in keyword-blocking of those specific keywords, the volume of blocking, and, in the UK, we’ve seen a 77% decrease,” she says.
“Over the past few weeks, we’ve definitely seen a decrease and marketers becoming more comfortable running their brands adjacent to COVID content.”
What may be a turning of the corner is happening for several reasons…
Alarmed by advertisers shunning news sites early in the pandemic, publishers, broadcasters, agencies and industry bodies have worked hard to convince them it may be futile and destructive.
IAS’ Utzschneider says publishers have sent her “unsolicited thank-yous” for having published research and information which may be changing advertisers’ minds.
“Education is critically important,” Montgomery says. “When we did some research, our team did a research of 80 of our largest clients, what those clients came back with is that 92% of them are now either not blocking news at all.
“Or, if they’re using any form of keyword-avoidance, they’re doing it in a sophisticated way by combining the really grim news with something like ‘COVID-avoidance’, maybe ‘COVID-avoidance’ and ‘death toll’, or ‘refrigerated trucks’, or ‘miracle cure’ or anything like that.”
U.S. Ad Market Plummets 35% In April, Second Consecutive Month Of Faltering Demand: Ad demand fell 35% year-over-year in April, marking its lowest point since MediaPost and Standard… https://t.co/JHlO94rH1y @mp_joemandese
— Digital Content Next – #StayHome + Save Lives (@DCNorg) May 21, 2020
Deeper software-based analysis of news stories and even videos is now able to provide more refined cues about the real meaning of content – its context.
Making these cues available through buying platforms, for “contextual targeting”, is helping advertisers continue to buy against some kinds of COVID-19 content without resorting to a blanket ban.
“We would never advise a marketer to completely block news,” says IAS’ Utzschneider. “The technology that is available for marketers today, it’s incredibly sophisticated.
“Marketers can get much more precise about the type of content that they’re comfortable their brands running next to and the type of content that they’re not comfortable running next to.”
Advertisers’ belief that consumers would view them negatively if placed against coronavirus content may not only be wrong – it may be a missed opportunity. Audience research is piling up that shows advertisers perhaps don’t need to dodge coronavirus news at all. An April study conducted by IAS found:
“Consumers are much more open to seeing ads from healthcare verticals or education and a lot less engaged with verticals like travel,” IAS’ Utzschneider says.
This situation is not one where either ‘more’ or ‘less’ keyword blocking should be universally adopted as the only protective measure, it is one that highlights the need for precision in guiding a brand toward or away from content corresponding with that brand’s values & identity pic.twitter.com/TnuPI08Wh6
— Integral Ad Science (@integralads) March 18, 2020
So, GroupM’s Montgomery hopes the situation may be heading “in the right direction”. The brand safety leader at the world’s largest media-buying agency laments the situation the earliest throes of the “brand safety” outcry has sowed.
“We’ve become so sensitive to controversial information,” he says. “There’s been sort of a deep concern about appearing next to anything controversial or perhaps even bad news.
“Consumers in the main don’t perceive a brand in any negative way if they appear next to controversial news. Sometimes, the harder the news the better, because there’s a longer dwell time.”
Several groups are trying to force the “brand safety” debate toward an understanding that all news output is “brand-safe” but where a more refined understanding of news context can give finer cues about whether distinct content is “brand-suitable”.
Local news is dying. Advertisers can help. We offer some suggestions. @taxidodger @unitedfornews @internews https://t.co/70TmbPWji6
— Jennifer Cobb (@jjunecobb) May 4, 2020
All of this is not only important to marketers, which are searching for the best way to spend money to reach audiences, but also to news publishers and broadcasters.
They have been walloped by declining ad revenue and diminishing ad rates during the pandemic, pushing many to make large-scale staff reductions and to offer advertising at knock-down rates.
The threat to democracy from the death of news organizations has, which was already playing out, has been ratcheted-up.
Montgomery says he hopes initiatives from the likes of Local Media Consortium, Worldwide Association of Newspapers and the SSP TripleLift can help plug tens of thousands of local media sources into the programmatic ad supply chain, helping to bring money back to publishers.
“We’re trying to re-monetize this so that we can make sure that as many of the other newspapers, and particularly the local newspapers, survive the COVID crisis,” Montgomery says.
This video is part of a series titled Brand Suitability at the Forefront, presented by Integral Ad Science. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Selling products for infants, Danone knows that it’s extremely important that they are aware of what context they are advertising in, and that brand safety is paramount.
“It’s even more important that the context in which we are talking online and on mobile is extremely controlled, extremely respectful of the parents who are online and are looking at this content.” Doat says.
The pandemic hasn’t changed the importance around this, but in her position at Danone, Doat-Le Bigot has picked up on some ways that the doing business has changed. The first of the trends that she has noticed is that people are buying online in a more diverse way.
“They were not looking at one-stop-shop to buy everything online because they had more time to discover content, discover places of discussion, discover forums, discover a new form of influence.” Doat says. “Influence marketing in digital has been widely disrupted during this pandemic.”
Direct-to-consumer sales for many of their products has risen in an unprecedented way. People were traditionally not eager to buy food online, but that has changed.
“In a way, this pandemic has made us leapfrog by two or three years in the usage of consumers to buy online,” Doat says. “And that’s for me probably a shift which we could foresee the beginning of it, the seeds of it, but not the momentum that we have now.”
The pandemic’s effect on people’s ways of living has made it so that they simply will not be able to spend money in the same way.
“It has an impact on the affordability and accessibility of the products that we need to think very seriously so that we address as many consumers as possible in view and in the know of the new capabilities of people to actually spend money on food.” Doat says.
Given these changes, Danone’s approach to media investment, especially around news, has changed as well. The company has steered clear of advertising during live news, because there is not as much of a way to control the context. There’s some certain thematic, news-driven content that they have found some success with that deals with topics like food and water accessibility.
“We are never doing it if the level of control is not high into what type of content is provided,” Doat says. “You have new media platforms which are very able to give you the kind of thematic they are approaching and the ways they are investigating. If we believe this is very objective and not political and not polemical, there is no reason not to put advertising in this type of context.”
This video is part of a series titled Brand Suitability at the Forefront, presented by Integral Ad Science. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Back in March, many advertising buyers began using keyword blocking tools to swerve virus-related stories, or simply stopping advertising in news altogether, believing it to be too negative to be “brand-safe”.
But Integral Ad Science (IAS) research has shown how many audiences actually crave coronavirus news and don’t penalize brands for adjacency to it, whilst organizations like the 4As, Digital Content Next and the IAB have sought to educate brands.
In particular, the 4As recently published a cross-industry position paper declaring: “The overwhelming majority of news content is brand safe—if not necessarily suitable—for brands and advertisers. Large, wide-ranging blacklists are both excessive and infrequently updated, and often counterproductive.”
It is part of initiatives to tell marketers – news is brand-safe, but particular kinds of news may or may not be suitable for different marketers.
In the latest few weeks, CNN has rediscovered advertisers that had previously clammed up.
“(Some of) the brands coming to us … previously had a stated ‘no news’ policy,” says Christine Cook, SVP of WarnerMedia and chief revenue officer of CNN Digital.
“We are working with the 4As and a lot of our clients to either put them contextually against content that is appropriate for their message or using technology like SAM, our Sentiment Analysis Monitor that we launched a little over a year ago, to either target away from contextually appropriate content that’s inappropriate for them, or target toward positive sentiment.”
Today at 2pm ET! Our #BusinessAsUnusual webinar on Brand Safety with @GroupMWorldwide’s Joe Barone, @nytimes’ Allison Murphy & @tag_today’s Mike Zaneis (and read the recent Brand Suitability paper: https://t.co/xM5uRv5K9d).
Register for the webinar: https://t.co/MB6waw8JWW pic.twitter.com/bu1EAjb593
— 4A's (@4As) May 5, 2020
That last piece, context, may be the development which unlocks the more nuanced understanding of “brand suitability” that publishers are aiming to deliver.
Semantic analysis software running in a growing number of ad platforms can peer deep in to the inner meaning of content, making it available as richer indicators to buy ads against.
That can mean the difference between signalling a COVID-19 story about death counts and one about community human-interest stories.
In Cook’s case, CNN is having to offer that capability across a splintering array of devices – made more challenging by audience patterns exacerbated by COVID-19.
“Now that everyone’s sharing a household, people are looking at all of the channels, because not everyone can fit in that one place where they maybe used to go before,” she says.
Finding a way to make advertisers comfortable with news is critical, because news organizations have been walloped by declining ad revenue and diminishing ad rates during the pandemic.
CNN has been match-funding purpose-driven digital ad buys and committing further TV inventory to public health campaigns.
“The importance of news, generally, I believe is very high,” Cook says. But, at this moment, the trust that consumers have in us and the role that we play in getting information to them … is inextricably tied to politics.
“That service journalism has created an opportunity for us to provide service advertising.”
When news breaks, audiences turn to CNN:
• 184M unique U.S. visitors in March (70% of total U.S. internet audience)
• 173M U.S. unique visitors in April
• 259M global unique visitors in MarchThank you for trusting us when it matters the most.https://t.co/aJBVC8kHbi pic.twitter.com/6fn5Aw1J1b
— CNN Communications (@CNNPR) May 15, 2020
This video is part of a series titled Brand Suitability at the Forefront, presented by Integral Ad Science. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But publishers may be able to soften the blow and give advertisers what they want by using their own tools.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, Chance Johnson, chief revenue officer of Integral Ad Science (IAS), says: “For publishers specifically, we’ve created tools that will allow them to proactively target ads and inventory away from particular advertisers that are sensitive to a specific piece of content.
“It’s allowing them to curate their ads and optimize their ads in a way that is going to drive the most yield, allow them to monetize the most impressions and, most importantly, avoid any unnecessary blocking of ads.”
Johnson advocates the use of “cognitive semantic technology”, which can peer deep in to the inner meaning of content, making it available as richer indicators to buy ads against.
That is part of the growth of “contextual” ad targeting.
In November, IAS acquired ADmantX, whose semantic analysis software aims to create, from stories, corresponding flags for emotions and sentiments, plus for entities contained in stories, which can be leveraged by media buyers and sellers.
“There’s a very big difference between a story that’s talking about something negative like the increased risk of increased death toll if we open states too early, versus a really positive and uplifting story about a frontline medical workers and the sacrifices they’re making,” Johnson adds.
“Our responsibility is to give our customers the ability to make that distinction, and align against the content that they feel is right for their particular brand.”
But audience research is piling up that shows advertisers perhaps don’t need to dodge coronavirus news at all. An April study conducted by IAS found:
Consumers’ views seem at odds with those of brands. In a March marketer survey from IAS:
Still, IAS’ Johnson understands brands’ quest for appropriate environments. He just see s distinction between the idea of “brand safety” and what he calls “brand suitability”.
He says “brand safety” is a binary concept, wherein advertisers will want to swerve content like hate speech or adult material. But “brand suitability” is more nuanced and, so requires a deeper understanding of content.
“The current economic and pandemic situation that we’re in, it’s certainly accelerated the adoption of brand suitability for a number of different reasons,” Johnson says.
“We’ve seen increased demand. We expect that to continue, especially as advertisers get much more focused and refining and getting precise about what’s appropriate for them.”
This video is part of a series titled Brand Suitability at the Forefront, presented by Integral Ad Science. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Initially putting investment on hold during the initial days, advertisers are finding that news is increasingly providing “positive associations” says Joe Barone, Managing Partner, Brand Safety, US at GroupM in this interview Beet.TV
CTV Lacks Transparency
Barone sees the CTV ecosystem as troubled by a lack of transparency, multiple technology platforms along wiht fraud and piracy. He says the industry needs to run exclusion and exclusion lists. “We need know where we are running,” he demands. He calls for the industry adoption of bundle ID’s.
This video is part of a series titled Brand Suitability at the Forefront, presented by Integral Ad Science. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>The conversation has moved on to brand suitability and the tools in the hands of buyers and publishers have become much more refined, says David Murnick, EVP for Digital Operations at Dentsu Aegis Network in this interview with Beet.TV
Verification companies have evolved with acquisitions of machine learning companies and other tools which have brought the industry far beyond simply blacklisting certain URL’s, Murnick adds.
This video is part of a series titled Brand Suitability at the Forefront, presented by Integral Ad Science. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>In March, many brands began using brand safety tools’ keyword blacklisting features to dodge ad inventory adjacent to coronavirus news, or simply pulled out of news altogether, fearing that association with downbeat stories would harm their brand.
But Bill Koenigsberg, CEO and Founder of Horizon Media, the largest independent media agency in the U.S., says things are improving.
“Early on in the first two weeks, when the predictions were out there with potentially a million people dying … marketers were very careful to stay out of that environment,” he says in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“The news is slowly getting better and a little bit more optimistic, you’re seeing more and more marketers gravitate back into the news environments.”
US virus deaths were 85,197 at time of writing, but the last few weeks have seen fewer daily deaths and a growing proportion of coronavirus patients recovering, according to statistics.
The whole episode has forced brands – and their agencies – to think on their feet.
“I think it took a couple of weeks for certain clients to realize they’ve got to change their messaging,” Koenigsberg says. “Now you have seen so much more supportive, caring, purposeful messaging out in the marketplace from a tonality standpoint.
“We have told our entire brand strategy teams and activation teams, ‘we’ve got to scrutinise every piece of creative that goes on the air to make sure that there cannot be any backlash from the tonality and the content within the messaging out there’.”
Koenigsberg says some marketers, early in the pandemic, got their creative messaging “tone-deaf”, but quickly improved to match the times.
Although Koenigsberg says marketers are coming back to news because the news is getting more positive, some studies show they need not have swerved news in the first place.
Results of a survey from March by Integral Ad Science (IAS) show:
In a follow-up study in April, IAS found:
Consumers’ views seem at odds with those of brands. In a March marketer survey from IAS:
This video is part of a series titled Brand Suitability at the Forefront, presented by Integral Ad Science. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Preparedness and resilience for large-scale resets are emerging onto the agendas of businesses around the world, and marketing is no exception.
In the last couple of months, many brands have had to quickly adjust their advertising strategy for different business circumstances and their creative to be more suitable for pandemic-era consumers.
Greg Anderson thinks this agility in pursuit of brand suitability can be expressed through dynamic creative optimization (DCO), the advertising technology that can allow ad buyers to quickly reassembly the creative in their ad slots.
“One area where I think we will see some adjustments is in the approach around planning and how advertisers want to adjust for any type of changes that may occur in their approach, in the economy or marketplace itself,” says the MD of Xaxis Media Group, the GroupM unit.
“With the adjustments to the economy and the consumer, we’ve seen a lot of brands leaning into dynamic messaging and changing that strategy altogether.”
DCO was already rising in prominence in the couple of years prior to the pandemic, as some ad buyers sought to assemble optimal ads for the right audience using raw components of underlying creative.
Now ad-tech vendors are also suggesting DCO could be one way they can practice the kind of agility necessary to respond to profound and sudden change.
“We’re templatizing that approach for the brands and allowing different types of messages to be fed-in based on the consumers they’re reaching and how they’re trying to drive different types of performance metrics for their campaigns,” Anderson adds.
“Within pharma and health, we’ve seen them changing their approach around messaging and how they align with the consumer. In some cases with retailers, we’re seeing a shift from driving people in-store to picking up kerbside or to their e-comm sites.”
Although TV ad rates are commonly known to have crashed, Anderson says, in a DCO world, that isn’t always the case.
“It’s not as simple as that,” he says. “We’re seeing that some brands are actually leaning into it in a very big way, wanting to align with COVID messaging and new sites, others want to steer clear of it.
“And so, depending on that strategy, we’re actually seeing, in some cases, prices increase.
This video is part of a series titled Brand Suitability at the Forefront, presented by Integral Ad Science. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
]]>But that shouldn’t be the case when it comes to advertising against news.
Interpublic’s UM Worldwide has become the latest agency in a procession of industry players to counsel advertisers against blacklisting news publishers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, UM’s chief digital and innovation officer Joshua Lowcock explains: “News is absolutely, categorically a brand-safe environment to be. There is no reason to avoid news and say that it’s not brand-suitable.
“The notion that you should somehow avoid negative news is, I think, a dangerous path to play because … it’s a slippery slope and you can’t ever win that debate. What’s negative to one person might not be negative to another.
“In the research that we’ve done, no one blames a brand for COVID-19 or coronavirus or a negative news event.”
From the early stages of the pandemic, many advertising buyers began using “brand safety” tools in ad-buying platforms to swerve ad opportunities against coronavirus-related content, or simply stopped advertising in news altogether.
That comes as publishers struggle to cope with a large-scale advertising drop-off that has pushed many farther to the brink of survival.
Even as the likes of Comscore launched an “epidemic brand safety filter” to help advertisers dodge types of virus news, IAB president David Cohen published an IAB article, How Brands and Agencies Can Save American Lives in The Coronavirus Crisis, urging an end to the practice.
Publishers’ group Digital Content Next also wrote a letter to marketers and ad verification companies asking them to exempt premium, trusted media companies from COVID-19 brand safety filters.
For UM Worldwide’s Lowcock, when it comes to ad inventory, there is a difference between “brand safety” and “brand suitability”.
“I think brand safety is well-defined … it’s advertising or sponsoring content that encourages hate, violence or misinformation,” he explains.
“I think (brand) suitability is less well-defined. The industry needs to evolve a little bit and stop seeing brand suitability as yet another avoidance strategy.
“If you’re marketing or advertising a certain product or service and it’s not empathetic to the environment that you’re in, that’s really the brand suitability crux or nexus of the issue that you need to resolve and that’s what’s come to light in this present time that we’re in.”
Results of a survey published recently by Utzschneider’s IAS show:
So Lowcock is amongst the agency executives urging advertisers – stay in news, but recalibrate your messaging.
“If anything, the learning from this moment, regardless of advertising category is, be appropriate with your messaging and have the right creative that is appropriate to the times and the environment.
“Make sure that your creative is right and your creative is empathetic and sensitive, then it will be more than likely be brand-suitable.”
Lowcock thinks smart tagging of the real meaning of content can help the industry get there.
“Where we hope tools will go is beyond being blunt-force objects and more so contextual and sentiment analysis because that’s where you can actually be much more intelligent and misconstruing what a word means and the actual context would go away.
“So you’d take a word like ‘shooting’ – from shooting a goal to shooting a human being, you actually know what the differential is between them and go, ‘Okay, one is a good place to be. It’s safe to be. The other one, I need to know a bit more detail or adjust my messaging if I’m going to be in that environment’.”
Production Note: The backdrop in this video is an image of the UM conference room. This video was produced remotely at Joshua’s home.
This video is part of a series titled Brand Suitability at the Forefront, presented by Integral Ad Science. For more segments from the series, please visit this page.
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