BUYER BEWARE

Thompson says that transparency and brand safety debate comes down to four important areas that brands need to consider any time they spend money on digital media.

1) Environment:

This is the area that’s getting the most profile at the moment. As a brand ‘you are the company you keep’ and no one wants to see advertising alongside or funding sites that don’t align with your brand values (we have seen some high profile and fairly shocking examples of this recently). The good news is that this is also the simplest to fix; most agency trading desks have a ‘whitelist’ of preapproved sites for brands to advertise on, alongside a ‘blacklist’ of sites to specifically avoid. At KPEX, we have seen a number of advertisers shift the focus of their investment towards our exchange so they can be confident in appearing on 100 percent premium New Zealand inventory (a built-in ‘whitelist’ if you like).

2) Content:

Within all sites there will be content advertisers would prefer not to appear next to, for example, an airline may not want to advertise around an article that mentions the words ‘plane crash’. This is also relatively simple to avoid, most of the leading brands within the programmatic space have fairly comprehensive lists of ‘negative keywords’. Trading desks can use their ‘brand safety technology’ to scan a page and ensure that activity doesn’t run on keywords that have a perceived negative connotation to the brand.

3) Technology transparency:

Within programmatic advertising we are increasingly using technology to improve buys, reduce wastage by targeting the right people to create more efficient campaigns. Some of the technology enables advertisers to buy programmatically, other tech overlays audience-targeting information while a further piece of technology ensures brand safety. All of these solutions are important to advertisers and add significant value to the process. The key is for advertisers to really understand the ‘why’ of each piece of technology that is being used and the commercial relationship that sits below this.

4) Agency transparency:

It’s hard to have a conversation around transparency without the subject of agency transparency arising. It’s natural that as an industry dramatically transforms there will also be a need for a reset of what represents value and the commercial model attached to it. Advertisers need confidence that their agency partners are making buying decisions for the right reasons and this comes from complete transparency throughout the value chain. At the same time, we need a reset on what represents value and for advertisers to remunerate agencies fairly for the skills required to be effective from strategy through to buying.