Brand Suitability vs. Brand Safety

Not a topic for scaredy-cats.
But for smart planners.

Targeted, individualized, and automatically booked and served advertising on the Internet (read more in our blog post Programmatic Advertising) is an unbroken and certainly unstoppable trend. In professionally organized online campaigns, there is no way around publishing content automatically in order to reach predefined target groups as precisely as possible and in the appropriate advertising environment. Given the vast number of different channels (media, blogs, vlogs, clips, and social media areas), it is impossible to assign them manually – which is why algorithms take over this task.

Keywords and contents
We are all familiar with this situation from our daily media work: Next to a report about a plane crash, there is advertising for particularly cheap air travel. Or a blog post about domestic violence is financed with advertising for the latest first-person shooter. Whoops … how could this happen? Quite simply, the keywords in the respective text (= advertising environment) triggered the booking for a product with the exact keywords. But the algorithm did not realize that the combination of the exact keywords can display different content! A clear case for “brand safety”!

Block, block, and block again
Media planners rely on “brand safety” to ensure that this does not happen (the brand’s presentation in an inappropriate environment). Exclusion lists are ideal for defining framework conditions in whose background online advertising should NOT be placed. In principle, such exclusions are intended to protect companies from illegal content in the advertising environment – of course, individually selected keywords can also be included in these exclusion criteria. Trendy are keywords such as “dead,” “die,” “accident,” and the like in all grammatical forms.

Targeted, individualized, and automatically booked and placed advertising on the Internet is an unbroken and certainly unstoppable trend.

How about brand suitability instead?
The brand “Suitability” can be translated very broadly as “suitability,” “fitness,” or “usefulness.” Therefore, it describes a selective approach that does not rely on the pure blocking and exclusion of terms and topics but includes the context, i.e., the context of the content, in the planning. At first glance, this approach may seem more time-consuming. It also brings significantly better results and creates noticeably better conversion rates by addressing the target group with high precision!

“Dead” is not the same as “dead.”
A simple example of this: The keyword “dead” can have different meanings in terms of content. The passengers from the crashed plane are indeed “dead.” But the latest movie could be “die laughing.” So excluding keywords (via exclusion lists) is not enough. It also needs proactively and positively created inclusion lists, specifically keywords (and thus advertising environments), in the planning. It goes without saying that this process must be continuously adapted and updated – after all, the respective advertising environment is also evolving. In this way, brand safety is transformed into much brighter brand suitability.

Everything can be optimized!
At DeSight Studio, we value innovative solutions – they ensure significantly higher efficiency and thus more successfully implemented online campaigns. Instead of offering “off-the-shelf” concepts, we always focus on customized solutions that deserve this designation. Brand suitability is an important module that allows you to set up your online communication in a truly individual way and to use channels (exclusively) that other market participants do not even use due to very general exclusion lists. Or to put it another way: We like to take a closer look at a potential advertising environment!

DeSight Studio GmbH | Wolfgang Zdimal

Journalist and professional copywriter Wolfgang Zdimal wrote this article on behalf of DeSight Studio GmbH and published by DeSight Studio GmbH. Wolfgang Zdimal, who manages his business from Vienna, Austria, has more than 20 years of professional experience and writes for the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber, BAWAG P.S.K. Bank or just for DeSight Studio GmbH.