Montgomery was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology. Please find more coverage from the conference here.
Now technology has helped iron out kinks in where ads get placed – but the man leading the charge says “brand safety” concerns are still around, they have just morphed.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, John Montgomery, GroupM’s EVP and advisor on brand safety, discusses how brand safety is changing into something else.
Montgomery says brand safety is no longer just about protecting the image of a brand – now it also contributes to the effectiveness of an ad.
Montgomery says the “safety” concerns are being “elevated” to dwell on “suitability” – more broadly examining the rights and wrongs of a particular piece of inventory for an advertiser.
“Your brand may run in a safe environment but, if it’s not contextually suitable, it’s not going to work nearly as hard,” Montgomery says.
“So the 4A’s, GARM (Global Alliance for Responsible Media) and other groups are hard at work with identifying suitability categories and standards that everybody will agree to and build into their technology to allow us to run in suitable areas – not just safe areas, but suitable areas as well,” he explains.
It’s a step onward from the 2017 outcry about YouTube placements, when many brands became upset at lack of control over placements bought in automated systems.
“I think the platforms have stepped up with technology and AI to make it much safer for brands,” Montgomery says.
“The chances of a brand being positioned adjacent to harmful content are now much diminished, compared to four years ago.”
GroupM and Montgomery even developed their own in-agency tool, Brand Safety Risk Assessment, to help clients determine the brand safety of inventory.
Risk analysis helps guide clients in the brand safety process https://t.co/Lmxum3jSpb#loopme #brandsafety
— John Montgomery (@taxidodger) December 14, 2020
Montgomery says brand suitability concerns are taking on four new shapes.
On that last point, Montgomery says they are asking themselves: “Do I want to use my media schedule to send a signal to potential partners that protecting brands is not enough… ?
“… that consumer safety is paramount and that bias against protected groups, digital privacy, graphically obscene content and irresponsible treatment of debated social issues must be elevated to the status of priority, beyond revenue generation?”
That set of concerns is far wider than that which first reared its head around 2017, when outcries by brands over widely-reported placement next to controversial content prompted a wave of demand for greater control.
In an automated ad world, advertisers want to be sure they can guard against mess-ups.
Montgomery is also working outside of GroupM to implement such solutions. In December, he joined the data advisory board of LoopMe, a company whose software closes the loop from ad exposure to outcome attribution.
LoopMe Welcomes MediaLink’s Wenda Harris Millard and GroupM’s John Montgomery to Data Advisory Board
“Companies like LoopMe are putting a huge effort into brand suitability and a targeting engine to help clients put their advertising in front of the right people, in the right context, at the right time,” Montgomery says.
“What LoopMe’s in-flight optimization does to help this is to measure and adjust the flight whilst the campaign is running, versus waiting until the end of the flight, to know if your campaign moved the needle.
“This not only saves large chunks of revenue that would have been wasted on non-optimal impressions, but it makes the advertised brand more agile and more responsive.”
You are watching “Outcomes-Based Advertising: Connecting Ad Exposure to Business Results,” a Beet.TV leadership video series presented by LoopMe. For more videos, please visit this page.
]]>Last week, Comscore said 22% to 30% of all ad impressions were appearing in coronavirus-related content. Such content is now being widely blacklisted by ad buyers, whose brand safety tools allow them to use keywords to avoid their ads appearing against particular kinds of content. BuzzFeed also reported the scale of the problem.
Even as Comscore offered advertisers a new “epidemic brand safety filter” last week, the IAB and Digital Content Next called on advertisers to cease the practice.
Early in March, a GroupM executive told Digiday: “Less than one third of GroupM’s clients are blocking coronavirus terms, and those that aren’t either don’t advertise against news at all or don’t do a lot of keyword blocking in general”
In this video interview with Beet.TV, John Montgomery, EVP of global brand safety for GroupM, says: “Newspapers are a brand-safe environment in the main, they have high viewability, they have low ad fraud …
“Marketers are so worried about their ads being seen adjacent to the news of the virus. But research shows that people are not turned off brands if they see as adjacent to COVID-19 news.
“Integral Ad Science did some research recently that showed that 78% of people are fine with it. There are some exceptions for food and travel and that makes sense.
“Other research shows that the harder the news, the better. So, research does not support the current marketer concerns.”
Advertisers behavior runs contrary to the audience pattern. News site traffic is spiking up for many publishers.
Even so, the crisis is pushing some newspapers, many of which have been teetering on the brink for years, to the brink of extinction, challenged by inability to print and deliver and by consumers’ inability to get out and buy. Several newspapers and alt-weeklies have announced pay cuts and layoffs, with some shutting down operations altogether, The Hill reports.
Montgomery is worried. “Whilst big media are suffering, it’s a crisis for local news,” he says. “Many of them are not going to get through this.
“This news needs ad revenue. It’s vital at this time to include newspapers and especially local papers on media schedules. Without it, I think we’re in grave danger. This isn’t just about keeping newspapers alive, it’s about free speech and democracy that literally depends on it.”
Closing newspapers won’t just be democracy’s loss, it will be the advertisers’, Montgomery says.
“The fact is that news is a very effective advertising vehicle,” he adds. “Readers are engaged with the articles that they choose to read. They spend longer reading them. There’s more dwell time and that means a better opportunity for your ads to be seen. But readers also trust their favourite local newspaper and that trust rubs off on advertising.”
Facebook has pledged $100 million in grant money and ad spending to help struggling news outlets, WSJ reports.
GroupM’s global business of business intelligence Brian Wieser recently told Beet.TV brands should aim to be useful during the pandemic.
Montgomery is urging advertisers to think differently.
“If you need to use keyword blocking, don’t use it as a blunt tool,” Montgomery says. “Don’t use exact-match (for) ‘COVID-19’ or ‘coronavirus’ exclusions. Because this is automatically going to demonetize all content that contains these words.
“Instead, use something like exclusions (features) which will reduce the possibility of over-blocking things like ‘COVID-19 death’ or ‘COVID-19 death counts’ or ‘coronavirus death toll’ or ‘COVID-19 miracle cure’ or a combination of those words.
“You can work with your agency or verification provider if you need help with a strategy.
“I would say to the verification providers, although they are following the instructions from agencies and marketers have given those agencies guidance about limiting risk in the news environment, make sure that you educate your clients on how to use keywords as a strategic tool rather than a blunt tool.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of brand safety and the use of keyword blocking during the COVID-19 pandemic. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>This March, we ran a whole series – Why News in Today’s Marketplace – on how news publishers were arguing for their continued place in the marketing mix.
Now The Wall Street Journal is bringing wider prominence to the issue, with a feature story – Advertisers Blacklist Hard News, Including Trump, Fearing Backlash – that lifts the lid on how brands are increasingly using blacklisting.
“Bomb,” “immigration,” “racism,” "Trump." Companies don't want their online ads to appear near certain words in news articles. https://t.co/1Z56qVM23R
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) August 15, 2019
According to the story:
Suzanne Vranica’s story hears from news executives and agency representatives alike who are growing increasingly worried at the sophistication and bluntness with which ad buyers are using digital keywords to swerve around current affairs. She brings industry data to describe the problem:
Ad verification tools launched keyword blacklisting as a response to earlier misplacements of advertising against questionable content, landing brands in hot water with customers and onlookers.
But many are concerned that advertisers’ response to the crisis has gone too far, and that refusing to spend money against some of the most necessary and difficult news coverage will discourage publishers from featuring important stories.
]]>On the one hand, many consumers are now ebbing away from classical news outlets, instead getting their information through social platforms.
On the other, advertisers are following suit – alarmed at either the consumer migration or the increasingly downbeat tenor of news stories in 2019, or both.
You may not expect an ad agency boss to give two hoots about news publishers – but John Montgomery thinks the problem is grave and existential.
“News organizations aren’t getting the revenue that they deserve because … marketers have been worried about adjacency to risky content,” says GroupM’s global brand safety EVP, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“I think it’s (now) coming back, but it’s probably coming back a little too slowly. Marketers are finding that they can get impressions outside of news.”
But that belief isn’t all correct, Montgomery suggests. The news may be bad lately, but that doesn’t mean that bad news is a bad marketing environment.
“There are some very good quality impressions to be bought in news,” he says .”In fact, perhaps (there are) better quality impressions in news, because it’s around the issues of the day. So by not buying in news, we are missing out on a number of opportunities.”
In the US, Montgomery has seen consumer behavior flip, so that the majority of news consumption now occurs through social platforms.
And he wants to stop the destructive effect happening in less-mature news markets.
So GroupM is one of the partners working on United For News, a non-profit trying to help emerging news orgs battle disruptions from fake news to revenue pressure.
“This is a crisis for free press and potentially even for democracy,” he explains. “I think that (ad) buyers might say, ‘It’s not our job to save democracy. But we’ve had a couple of conversations with very big international marketers, and they’ve been responsive.
“We are going to them with a solution that gives them a large body of impressions, brand safety impressions, effective impressions created by journalists who understand local issues, local trends, and the local market. So they’re good quality impressions at a scale.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers. The series is sponsored by CNN. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Now he hopes advertisers can pay a price that reflects the improvement.
In this video interview with Beet.TV, John Montgomery, GroupM global brand safety EVP, reflects on the speech P&G chief brand officer Marc Pritchard gave to the IAB’s Annual Leadership Meeting in January 2017.
“The great news is … it’s a much, much more measured and safe environment for brands,” Montgomery says.
Overall quality in the digital supply chain has increased dramatically. Publishers are using Moat, DoubleVerify, Whiteops, Integral Ad Science so that, by the time we get the inventory, it’s already been scrubbed, it’s already quality impressions.
“We’re seeing a situation where brand safety has become table stakes for a publisher. I think most publishers realize that, unless they deliver brand safe quality impressions to a marketer, they’re not going to get onto the schedule at all.”
Brand safety has been one of marketers’ key concerns in the last couple of years – fanned not just by Pritchard’s salvo but also by high-profile examples of brands appearing next to unsavoury content.
That fired the starting gun for ad-tech platforms to introduce measures including keyword-based filtering of available ad opportunities, based on an understanding of the content there – a practice which now even stands accused by some publishers of going too far.
“Empirical research evidence shows that, once you deliver those quality impressions, the ads work better,” Montgomery says.
“It does justify a premium, or certainly not a declining price which is what’s been happening over the last few years, which is unsustainable.
“If we can prove that quality ads work better, we can at least stop the slide towards lower prices because in that sort of quagmire of lower pricing lies a lot of other safety brand problems that we’ve been experiencing.”
This segment is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting 2019, Phoenix. This series is sponsored by Telaria. Please find additional videos from the series on this page.
]]>“I think we’re moving into a stage where brand safety will become a commodity. Within a year or two years time, marketers simply won’t buy from publishers who don’t guarantee them brand safe inventory,” says John Montgomery, Global EVP, Brand Safety, GroupM. “And that’s going to be table stakes for vendors.”
This year and next, GroupM will be focusing on compliance, Montgomery explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
“But also we’ve tried to take the brand safety conversation from limiting risk onto another level now. What we’ve found is because of the way we buy, from mainly premium publishers and in a brand-safe environment, not only are we limiting clients’ risk but the ads are working better.”
So Montgomery is trying to convince GroupM clients and the advertising community as a whole that by buying better quality, “maybe the CPM’s will not be that low or they’ll be slighter higher than they are at the moment, but it will be worth it.”
GroupM has done studies in various countries “proving that brand safety not only limits risk but it works better. Buying quality actually sells. This is where we think we should take the conversation to after brand safety becomes kind of table stakes.”
With the European Union having a month ago instituted the General Data Protection Regulation for consumers, Montgomery says it’s had a heavy impact not just in Europe but around the world.
“Particularly Google and Facebook’s decision to limit access to measurability and, in some cases, access to brand safety tags. We’re still assessing the impact of that, but certainly we have more limited programmatic now.”
Although the scandal in which Facebook user data was improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica has made the marketing community “sit up and be concerned about consumer reputation and respect for consumer data,” it doesn’t seem to have negatively impact use of Facebook, according to Montgomery.
“I don’t think consumers are as concerned as we may think in the marketing community, which is good news because it gives us time to act and respect consumer data.”
This video is part of a series produced by Beet.TV at Cannes Lions 2018 about advertising accountability presented by Mediaocean. Please find more videos from this series here.
]]>“I think it’s becoming more viable and scalable every day,” Gotlieb says of set-top box, dynamic ad and smart TV addressability that can “aggregate a pretty substantial chunk of the population. I think this is the year that it becomes a truly scalable proposition.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the annual Transformation conference of the 4A’s, Gotlieb goes on to explain that GroupM’s initial focus on addressable ad targeting has been with clients that can do the “cleanest and quickest attribution” and for whom the value of an acquisition is highest. He cites financial, automobiles and the studio sector because the data are reasonably good and closed-loop attribution can be accomplished.
“Once that gets laid down properly, we will scale it out to the broader client list,” he says.
Creative versioning is something “we need to do a great deal of work on,” Gotlieb adds. “There are a couple of technologies that we’re working on that will enable things like segmentation. More to come.”
On the issue of brand safety, he says one’s response to recent headlines about digital ads appearing alongside objectionable content depends on “when you arrived at the party. We arrived at the party a long, long time ago.”
He goes on to outline the steps GroupM had taken to blacklist websites that “thrived from privacy violations” and once that list had been established “we began to add to that from a brand safety perspective.”
Gotlieb expresses wonder at “those people who are just waking up to brand safety issues,” citing the appointment last year of John Montgomery as Chief Brand Safety Officer.
“I don’t think the issue is one that we can throw the media owners under the bus on,” he says. “I think we have to take some responsibility for it and we have to work collaboratively to provide an ecosystem that is friendlier to our clients.”
This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.
]]>“We think we can catch 99.9% of inappropriate content before it goes out if we’re allowed to tag our ads on those properties,”GroupM brand safety EVP John Montgomery tells Beet.TV in this video interview.
“Our ad (would) read the metadata on the site, reads the URL; if there’s anything suspicious, it blocks the ad from appearing – but only if we can place our tags on those ads.”
In recent months, ad placement horror stories have hit the press, with The Times leading on YouTube showing A-list brands against terrorist content and some observers claiming extremists may have made $318,000 from YouTube ads. Dozens of top brands have pulled spending.
It is open season on brand safety, and Montgomery says journalists are “scouring inappropriate websites”, “pushing refresh” for what “makes a great headline”.
In ad tags, Montgomery thinks he knows the solution. But GroupM isn’t yet implementing the safety measure on ads bought for its clients, with Montgomery, who was named to this new role on the hot topic last year, blaming platforms.
“We can’t do that in a lot of the major social platforms like Google, Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter because of their data policies,” he says.
“That makes it more difficult for us to manage our own brand safety destinies. We are having discussions with them right now. Google has shown a little bit more flexibility in dealing with outside vendors as a result of this contextual brand safety crisis.”
Despite recent intense attention, Montgomery says not much has changed – brand safety issues are as old as online advertising. But what is different now is the volume of content used to placed ads against, and the attention of the media.
“Not a great deal of money is being paid to these inappropriate sites,” he says, adding that ad-tech platforms are legally obliged to stop the practice “We have a contractual commitment with vendors specifying that they won’t place our ads near inappropriate content.”
This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.
]]>“There are too many areas that we can measure,” said GroupM Connect’s north America chairman John Montgomery. “There’s almost infinite sources. There’s new things all the time.
GroupM’s Modi Media president Mike Bologna agreed it is stressful trying to keep up with all the new measurement criteria.
These days, fraud, viewability, reach and frequency have all joined click-through as barometers for assessing campaigns.
But OMD chief digital officer Ben Winkler urged peers to strip back a little. His company uses a single metric, CPVM (Cost Per Valuable Impression).
“Instead of finding the magic bullet, we’ve combined metrics in to one,” he said. “The more we make it like rocket science, the less it works.
“If we want to do this right, we simply ask our clients – ‘what do you see as success?’ You’ll be amazed at what they tell you – it’s plain English. They’re not talking about digital micro metrics. They’ll say, ‘I want to make sure you’re showing my ad to a real person in the right place and not too many times’. I can explain that to my mom!”
They were questioned by Tobi Elkin.
This video is from Media Future Conversations 2015: Unblocked – Valuing Human Attention In A Content-Driven World, an event presented by true[X] in association with Beet.TV Please find more event videos here.
]]>That fact is worrying advertisers. But what’s the reason? Over-zealous publishers who litter their pages with ads that clutter users’ experience, say a couple of executives who participated in an industry panel.
“I think specific abusive advertising experiences by certain publishers (are to blame),” says Sourcepoint Technology chief revenue officer Jared Lansky, whose company, founded by Admeld founder Ben Barokas, helps publishers instead “compensate” users for their attention.
“You go to a particular site and it just overtakes the experience; it’s too much and you want to get out. There’s no other option today than to install an ad blocker.”
Ghostery product director Jeremy Tillman agrees. His company makes a browser add-on that helps users see and control which companies can track them, including block them.
The problem is especially acute in mobile. “For a user, it slows it down and makes it more sluggish – they actually see the impact on the bill,” Tillman says.
But, he caveats: “Not all ads are created equal,. About 60% of our users want to stop disruptive ads.” But that diminishes for less intrusive inline ads, social and others ads.
The session was moderated by John Montgomery, Chairman of GroupM Connect.
This video is from Media Future Conversations 2015: Unblocked – Valuing Human Attention In A Content-Driven World, an event presented by true[X] in association with Beet.TV Please find more event videos here.
]]>“Ad blocking has been around for years and years now – but now, when it comes to mobile, the experience for consumers has really been a difficult one,” acknowledges John Montgomery, chair of ad group GroupM’s Connect division in North America.
“Mobile ads are more interruptive than they would be on the desktop or even in television. The amount of data that’s used and the way it slows consumers’ phones down gets in the way.”
Montgomery says consumers won’t begin accepting mobile ads until the experience is changed, until the quid-pro-quo value relationship is redefined by putting mobile content back in charge.
“It’s vital for us address the experience with consumers,” he adds. “I don’t think we can expect consumers to tolerate slow download times because of advertising. Let’s clean up the experience.”
We interviewed him at Media Future Conversations 2015: Unblocked – Valuing Human Attention In A Content-Driven World, an event presented by true[X] in association in association with Beet.TV Please find more event videos here.
]]>Ad Tech's SUM OF ALL FEARS pic.twitter.com/E1IQVduQi4
— Terence Kawaja (@tkawaja) September 15, 2015
But there is yet another industry practice to add to that list – pirate sites, which rip off premium publishers’ content in order to attract audiences, and ad spend. That doesn’t just hurt publishers affected – it also threatens advertisers, who want their ads to appear on kosher sites.
“I think it’s understated – I think it’s a billion-dollar problem,” says GroupM Connect’s north America chairman John Montgomery, in this video interview with Beet.TV.
“This isn’t something that (advertising) clients get immediately. They say, ‘Why is it my problem if content is being pirated?’ Clients don’t realise that their ads are what’s fuelling the profits of the at-risk entities, the pirate sites.
“It’s a serious, long-term problem. There are a lot of non-legitimate sites making tons of money. Our clients’ ads are making this happen.”
GroupM started working on its own approach to tackle the problem a couple of years ago, and, this February, the IAB’s Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) created a certification that will allow advertisers through compliant platforms to buy ads only on unpirated content.
Montgomery acknowledges the challenge: “The cheaters are always one step ahead of the chasers.” But he reckons recent initiatives will help: “It’s going to dry up the area of great funding for these pirate sites. It’s something that we can stop.”
This interview is part of a series of videos leading up to the DMEXCO conference in Cologne. The series is presented by 4C Insights + Teletrax.
]]>Since then, industry bodies have taken great strides to iron out the problem, whilst ad tech vendors are selling ad buyers on “viewability” solutions.
GroupM Interaction north America CEO John Montgomery tells Beet.TV, in this video interview, that negative headlines about “the two ugly sisters of the trust and supply chain – viewability and fraud” – have been “apocryphal and mostly based and self-interest … it’s confused marketers a hell of a lot”.
“But, in truth we’ve seen viewable ads increase by nearly 30% year-on-year. Other agencies I speak to have seen the same thing. Web designers are redesigning their pages to make them much more viewable. Marketers are responding by paying premium rates for more viewable ads. So there’s a huge good news story to be told.”
In addition to “viewable” metrics having been laid down by industry bodies, the ANA, IAB and 4As have jointly formed The Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), an effort to clean things up further.
Montgomery was interviewed by Beet.TV at the 4As’ (American Association of Advertising Agencies) Transformation 2015 event in Austin, Texas. Our coverage is sponsored by Videology. Please find more coverage from the conference here.
Last week, he and other advertising and media leaders met at the White House with Obama advisor John Podesta and his committee about the issue and solutions. In this interview, he discusses the meeting He also speaks about efforts around do not track in the aftermath of the failure to reach an agreement with the W3C.
]]>
“The US is trying to support self-regulation – we’re trying to avoid any form of legislation by regulating ourselves,” he says in this video interview with Beet.TV at DMEXCO. “We have an icon through the Digital Advertising Alliance that we place on all behavioral advertising to make sure consumers know, transparently, that data is being collected and they have an opportunity to opt out.
“In Europe, it’s much more about data consent and opting in, which we find is very, very restrictive. We’re worried about a more restrictive approach slowing the growth of the web. We so much need a silver lining in our economy right now. Digital is one of the biggest net contributors of jobs. We don’t want legislation to slow down or strangle that kind of growth.”
European rules on data collection were already more stringent than in the States, and some politicians like digital commissioner Neelie Kroes have lately made capital from the NSA PRISM snooping scandal, calling for consumer protection and for consumers to host their data on European servers.
“Things like PRISM really haven’t helped us. Sharing data with Europe right now is quite restrictive,” Montgomery tells Furious Minds CEO Ashley Swartz.
“Self-regulation’s already working. We’re serving more than a trillion of those privacy icons on all of our ads. Forty million people are going to the Ad Choices website. More than a million people have opted out.
“We really think that, the moment you introduce legislation, it’ll slow things down. Washington doesn’t move slowly, this business moves at lightning speed. We really don’t want to dumb it down to the lowest com denominator.”
Montgomery spoke with us after his panel on the topic of privacy.
]]>