Content Verification Guide: How to implement a brand safe strategy

Creating a safe online environment for brands is in all of our interests and every part of the digital ad industry has a role to play in ensuring this. In order to minimise brand safety risks without damaging advertisers’ reach and scale opportunities, a sophisticated and nuanced application of the tools available is required. Crucially, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, with brands needing to individually establish the level of safety measures necessary and tailoring their approach accordingly.

However, as our new cross-industry Content Verification Guide details, there are core factors that need to be considered when implementing a brand safety strategy:

• Misuse or overzealous use of content blocking can be damaging for both brands and publishers. Brands limit their reach by ruling out safe environments and publishers struggle to monetise their content

• Brand safety considerations need to be factored in from the start of campaign planning, as early as when choosing a buying model

• Keyword blocking is a blunt tool that doesn't take into consideration context. The effects of it should be carefully considered before it's applied

• Alternatively, semantics analysis is a more effective way of managing content blocking compared to keyword blocking. To benefit from this technology, you need to have a good understanding of how your partner's technology works

• Being in a hard news environment is not necessarily detrimental to your brand, with research showing that brain response is very similar for hard and soft news stories.

• In fact, a hard news environment delivers higher dwell times and higher potential for memory encoding

By taking on board the advice in this guide, we can build a more contextual system of content verification that supports brands, publishers and the functionality of our ad funded web.