Advertisers spend a lot of money to build their brands, and it doesn't take much to nullify a long-term brand investment. When we extend brand communications with advertising, many times we do that in certain ways so we can protect brand investments. At a minimum, we might establish brand or placement guidelines with media vendors to make sure we're presenting the brand in the best light. Those guidelines are typically easy to comply with when we talk about media like broadcast or print. Believe it or not, sometimes those simple brand-related requests are tough to execute in the digital realm.
"Keep my brand away from sites with questionable reputations"
This seems like a simple request, no? There are a few problems with this one, though. First and foremost, the important thing for advertisers to understand is that because of the nature of interactive campaign pricing models (CPM, CPC, CPA), digital media vendors are under more pressure than their offline counterparts to deliver to planned goals. If a digital campaign isn't delivering the planned number of impressions, leads or sales, the vendor can count on having an agency media buyer breathing down his neck for the duration of the under-delivery. This can create conditions where unscrupulous vendors see an advantage to gaming the system.
In reality, many vendors can get away with placing digital advertising in unapproved venues, without the advertiser or agency ever knowing about it. It's true that there's a risk associated with someone at the agency or the client seeing an ad running in an inappropriate venue, but if a handful of inappropriate sites are sprinkled into a network buy where hundreds or thousands of sites are participating, the likelihood of that happening is slim. Less scrupulous ad sellers know this and will sometimes take risks with an advertiser.
Unlike a magazine buy where the agency controls where each ad appears (and the media seller isn't incentivized to run ads in magazines other than the ones the client approved), there's a lesser degree of control on the digital side. Thankfully, a few companies like DoubleVerify and AdXpose have created a new category and addressed the problem of keeping ads out of unapproved venues.
The funny thing is that the major ad serving companies missed a major business opportunity in failing to address this issue. It's easy to write code that checks to see whether traffic coming through a given ad tag is coming from an approved venue. (Indeed, I remember AdForce having this capability in the late 1990s.) I have no idea why Atlas, DoubleClick, and others haven't implemented this as a feature.
In any case, the technology exists to severely cut back instances of unapproved sites. While it's up to the agency to implement, there are incremental technology and manpower costs associated with doing so, and advertisers need to fully understand the cost/benefit equation.
"Keep my brand away from questionable content"
In print, it's easy to attach a set of placement guidelines to an insertion order and effectively head off any problems with brands appearing in unfavorable content. In digital, though, most ad management systems are not set up to understand much about the content they're serving ads into.
Most ad sales reps can thus promise that they'll keep you out of the opinion section, for instance. But they can't promise to keep your brand away from an unfavorable opinion article that ends up on the homepage.
This is changing as semantic technologies proliferate. Technologies from ad network companies like AdPepper and Kontera do a good job of determining article topics, sub-topics, and sentiments. Their semantic technologies differentiate them from other offerings, and I think it's just a matter of time before other media vendors acquire similar technology in order to help protect brands and target ads.
"Keep my brand away from competitors"
Again, many advertisers are used to attaching guidelines to print insertion orders that keep them 10 pages away from direct competitors. Or they have agreements to keep their ads out of the same commercial pods in broadcast. It's not quite as simple in digital.
Sure, it's easy to do things like exclusive sponsorships that keep competitors locked out of content you're sponsoring. But if you're buying ad rotations throughout content, there's no guarantee yours won't show up on the same page as a competitor. Advertisers often have a hard time conceptualizing why this is a difficult situation to avoid, but suffice it to say that many publishers have several independently rotating ad placements on a given web page, and those placements may not "talk" to one another to find out which ad the other is displaying. There may not be anything built into the ad server that allows for competitive separation.
In fact, when advertisers absolutely insist on competitive separation, many publishers use a kludge (a clumsy workaround) to address the situation. They might place one competitor in a specific daypart and the other in a different daypart so their ads don't show up in the same section at the same time. Of course, there are a number of issues that arise from this approach, most notably the reach-limiting effects of appearing only in a specific daypart.
Again, the major ad servers are the key. They should standardize competitive separation and offer it to their publishing clients so that the expectations for digital are the same as those for other media.
These are just some of the simple tactics we use to help protect brands. Agencies and advertisers do so much more, but it's important that the digital side of the business get these simple things right so that digital advertising isn't the outlier. Technology should be able to address our needs, but it will get adopted quickly only if advertisers insist on compliance with the same stringent guidelines that are in place for offline media.
Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com.
On Twitter? Follow Tom at @THespos1 or @_MarketingLLC. Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet.