It’s 10 p.m. Do You Know Where Your Brand Is?

It’s among a parent’s worst nightmare to hear that after years of careful and protective watch, their impressionable progeny has been out carousing with the wrong crowd. Increasingly, this is also a concern for CMOs, who worry about who their brands are siding up to out in the digital world.

In this new landscape of changing media-consumption habits, user-generated content, social networking, and the recalibration of advertising dollars, brands are susceptible to more risks than they have been historically. With the emergence of display advertising as a key brand-building tool, specifically, CMOs and brand managers are looking for new ways to ensure their brands have the safety and security they need to thrive in the marketplace.

Given their more dynamic creative units, broader reach, and greater media efficiency, display ads, combined with emerging targeting technologies, are letting marketers reach the right consumer with the right message at the right time. The problem is, these messages are often reaching consumers in the wrong place.

Granted, automated and sophisticated display advertising-buying technologies are driving increased efficiency and relevance, but many of these technologies lack the proper safeguards to put brand marketers at ease. An increasingly concerning portion of brand advertising is appearing on problematic areas and adjacent to inappropriate content. The degree of risk related to these problematic ad placements varies significantly. For example, a moderately problematic adjacency could be a family-values brand appearing on a page advocating alcohol, thereby eroding brand equity value. A severely problematic adjacency could be pharmaceutical brand advertising on a page that constituted “off-label” advertising, thereby incurring financial regulatory penalties.

A recent study from the Winterberry Group, a strategic consulting group focused on the advertising and marketing industries, identified five types of risks and the potential threat that brand advertisers face in regard to online display advertising misplacements:

Type of Risk	Characterized by Site Content That…	Examples	Potential Threat to Brand
Dangerous	Defies baseline societal norms with respect to taste, respect, and basic courtesy; is patently offensive to some audiences	Hate speech, adult content, gratuitous violence, vitriolic commentary on virtually any issue	Severe
Contradictory	Undermines, challenges, or otherwise contradicts the value proposition or general message of an ad or its parent brand	Issue advocacy (or news reporting of such advocacy) directed against a brand or product; aggressive user-generated criticism of brand	Moderate to Severe
Vertically Misaligned	Defies regulatory guidelines or established norms pertaining to marketing of specific products (to specific audiences)	Inappropriate/”off-label” marketing of pharmaceutical, foods or other consumer goods to sensitive consumer cohorts (e.g. patients, children, etc.)	Varies, but typically Moderate to Severe
Contextually Inappropriate	Unwittingly casts a negative light on the product or parent brand, usually through ironic juxtaposition	Brand diminished by surrounding content that may promote ridicule; often blamed on “poor timing”	Moderate
Message-Misaligned	Does not align with the likely interests of the ad’s target consumer(s); appears starkly out-of-place	Messages targeted for niche audiences that appear on sites catering to others	Minor to Moderate

The growth of the display advertising industry, as well as the associated risks related to problematic online adjacencies, have motivated the online advertising industry to innovate technology solutions that can provide brands managers with the brand safety and security they demand from their advertising counterparties. Online brand safety providers address marketers’ concerns by enabling them to select the appropriate context for their ads and then prevent ads from appearing in unapproved contexts. Ad verification platforms provide post-campaign audit of where an ad appeared, enabling marketers to reconcile media make-goods.

These newly emerging technologies are enabling brand marketers to begin to harness the potential of the display advertising channel, while eliminating many of the brand safety concerns that have kept advertisers on the digital sidelines for years. However, until these technologies become standardized tools used by all marketers and publishers, digital marketing will be handicapped and deep consumer engagement will continue to evade marketers in the digital channel.