As a marketer, your number one priority is ensuring that your ads are perceived in the right way and understood by the right audience. This will have a decisive impact on your brand. Here are six tips for keeping your brand’s reputation safe while advertising.  

Brand Safety is the will and strategy to protect the reputation, goal, and image of a brand from negative influences or inappropriate content in online advertising. In recent times of programmatic and automated advertising, this topic has gained even more importance. Consumers don't perceive brands in isolation, and associate it with the environment in which they are presented.

Depending on the brand and target group, inappropriate environments include crime, terrorism, drugs, fake news, hatred, violence, abuse, and political conflict. However, the context is always important: while an airline would not want to place its advertising next to negative news about plane crashes, a railway company might even benefit from it.
According to Forbes Magazine it is always better to be proactive than reactive about brand safety because it's often very expensive and complicated to free a brand of a negative association. This is especially true with regard to consumer acquisition or retargeting.

Reputation, i.e. the opinion of a majority, can be divided into organic and event-related reputation according to the Serviceplan Corporate Reputation Report 2018.Organic reputation refers to the long-term experience with a product, such as its quality or its lack. Event-based reputation can be a hype about a product or a negative scandal in the press and is usually difficult to influence.

How can brands protect themselves

Companies should take care to control the environment of a brand to a certain degree. As a basic step, companies should define their own values, visions and philosophies. This helps to identify which environments are (not) appropriate for the brand and which measures need to be taken. Once this is done, there are various strategies and actions that management can take to protect or perhaps even improve the reputation.

1. Black- and whitelisting: Some companies maintain so-called Black- or Whitelists with publications and content that they (mis)trust or want to be associated with in order to increase brand safety.
2. Transparent monitoring: A transparent monitoring-solution of campaigns should be available under all circumstances to enable tracking. If a threat to the reputation is identified, concrete steps can be taken immediately.
3. Contextual targeting: Since the environment is of great importance, brands should consider where to place their campaigns. While traditional OOH or online marketing gives little control over who is confronted with the brand, FRAMEN has managed to guarantee exactly that by defining a semi-public area and live monitoring of the surrounding screen content, thus maximizing Brand Safety. This is what we call contextual targeting.
4. Founding and joining associations: The “Global Alliance for Responsible Media“, an association founded by members of the “World Federation for of Advertisers“ to which all well-known brands such as adidas, Bayer, BP, Danone, Diageo, LVMH, Mars, Mastercard, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, Shell and Unilever belong, also makes a major contribution to improving brand safety. Stephan Loerke, CEO of the EFC: "Our shared ambition is to create a sustainable advertising environment that positively impacts people, communities and society at large."
5. Choose your advertising platform wiseley: But advertising platform providers are also worried: Facebook (and therefore Instagram and WhatsApp) has over 35,000 employees involved in the issue, which includes deleting fake accounts, stopping the distribution of false news & spam, pornography, and regulating the companies that are allowed to display ads at all. With the help of its IA software, Facebook manages to discover over 95% of the content removed before anyone reports it. Also Google has several solutions - from individual regulations on which ads may be shown on a website to ads.txt - to provide protection for its customers and partners.
6. Using programmatic DOOH as a marketing channel: The environment and context in which an ad is placed can make or break a campaign. By starting your campaign with a programmatic DOOH advertising platform like FRAMEN, you can help ensure that your ads are seen in the most positive light possible. With this toolkit, you can focus on creating great content and take care of the right placement. Brands receive a multitude of data about the TV location in the semi-public area as well as about the target group prognoses before the campaign. Thus, the advertiser already knows before his campaign which people will pass by the screens in the ideal playout locations. Learn more about FRAMEN Ads Manager here.

We hope these six tips for brand safety help you navigate the online advertising landscape and get more confident in your advertising decisions. By following these simple steps, you can create a safe and successful online advertising experience for both your customers and your brand.

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