Posted on September 20, 2024 • 4 min read
Are your campaigns brand-safe and reaching real people?
It might seem simple, but it bears repeating: in order for your advertising campaign to be successful, it needs to be contextually brand-safe and seen by real people. Your messaging may be on-point, and your creative clever, but equally important for brand recognition, recall and engagement is a powerful, fine-tuned media buy reaching the right people.
Digital advertising carries risks that can affect consumer trust and impact media performance, especially for the financial category. When ads appear alongside misleading or unsafe content, credibility is at risk and efficiency drops. Investing in ad verification helps your campaigns run in trusted environments, protecting both brand reputation and media effectiveness.
How does it work?
Pollinate uses Integral Ad Science (IAS), a tool to measure brand safety risk, identify invalid traffic, and ensure viewability.
Brand safety means avoiding unsafe advertising environments to protect brand favorability, consumer trust and engagement. It is achieved by monitoring or blocking ad delivery near content that doesn’t align with your brand values.
Invalid traffic is online activity that does not represent interest from real people. This includes fraudulent and non-fraudulent activities that skew impression, click or conversion metrics toward inflated efficiency.
Viewability measures whether an ad has the opportunity to be seen by a consumer
Industry Benchmarks
56.8%
Viewability Rate (% of viewable ads/measured ads)
0.57%
Invalid Traffic Rate (% of ads detected by IAS as invalid traffic)
99.4%
Pass Rate (% of ads passed for invalid traffic + brand safety settings)
The Benefits of Ad Verification
Improved ROI: Identifying fraud and avoiding risky content can help maximize return on investment.
Consumer Trust: Brand favorability and consumer engagement improve when brands align with safe content, reducing the likelihood of a public relations crisis.
Adaptability: Verification levers can be adapted to brand values, markets and regulatory environments.
Optimized Budget: Combating fraud and invalid traffic supports media spend efficiencies.
Why is it important?
In order for your campaign to be successful, it needs to be seen, and in the correct context. Without brand safety measures, your campaign can fall flat, or even offend — and that translates into lost revenue, or even damage to the brand you’ve spent years building.
$4.6B
Yearly cost of invalid traffic for US digital marketing, advertising and media industry*
56%
Amount of consumers unlikely to engage with an ad appearing close to inappropriate content**
33%
Amount of ads missed by consumers due to media environment**
66%
Lower success rate for ads adjacent to risky political content**
71%
Amount of consumers who feel less favorable toward a brand with ads appearing close to inappropriate content**
75%
Amount of consumers feel less favorable towards brands advertising on sites spreading misinformation**
*Source: IAB & Ernst & Young **Source: IAS
Assessing Brand Safety Risk Levels
Ad verification tools like Integral Ad Science use technology to dynamically scores individual webpages to determine which content risk category they fall into, and to assess the level of risk they pose against identified settings.
Low risk page content is acceptable for all ages and audiences
Moderate risk page content is typically acceptable for most brands, somewhere in between low and high risk
High risk page content is explicitly offensive and likely doesn’t align with most brands
Risky content may include:
Adult: Contains adult content, descriptions, images, videos or topics.
Alcohol: Contains representations and endorsements/ glorification of alcohol consumption and/or abuse.
Illegal Downloads: Offer illegal viewing or downloading of copyrighted movies, music, games, software, including illegal links to copyrighted content.
Drugs: Contains representations and endorsements/glorification of illegal drugs and prescription drugs that are illegal bought, sold or traded.
Hate Speech: Promotes discrimination, denigration, aggression towards people or groups based on race, religion, gender, nationality or ethnicity.
Offensive Language: Contains offensive terms, insults, swear words, vulgar terms, and religious blasphemy.
Violence: Contains representations and endorsements/ glorification of violence.
Critical Checklist
Brand Safety: Using page-level analysis, control the context in which ads appear (based on client relevance).
Invalid Traffic: Identify when, where and how fraudulent and non-fraudulent traffic impacts paid ads.
Viewability: Access viewability metrics and optimize toward the top-performing formats.
Monitoring vs. Blocking
Integral Ad Science (IAS) reports ‘failed’ ads depending on identified campaign settings and various factors: brand safety risk thresholds, URL exclusion lists, keywords, geo parameters, language and invalid traffic.
– If campaigns are set to monitoring, failed ads will still serve.
– If campaigns are set to blocking, failed ads will not serve.
Example Strategies
Challenge:
Issues with brand safety, attention and ad fraud are amplified during an election year.*
Tips for Success:
Evaluate on a case-by-case basis to determine best use of IAS campaign settings:
– Consider flight, market, brand values, products, media mix, scale, etc.
– Apply contextual avoidance settings, where relevant (ex. Politics – Negative Content, Sensitive Social Issues, Protests, etc.).
– Monitor campaign brand safety, viewability and invalid traffic metrics weekly.
*Based on IAS 2020 election season data
Challenge:
Over-blocking keywords, URLs and thresholds can negatively impact both scale and campaign performance.
Tips for Success:
Find the balance between brand safety and scale, strategically blocking and monitoring, where relevant.
Closely monitor and optimize
throughout campaign flight.
Challenge:
Invalid traffic causes cost inefficiencies and can impact campaign performance.
Tips for Success:
Monitor fraud trends and fluctuations, including AI advancement, and privacy laws to stay adaptable.
Implement blocking technology and exclusion lists, customized approach by tactic.
Understand invalid metrics by channel and partner to inform future decisions.
Looking for a solid agency partner who takes digital ad verification seriously — and can help you build brand fanatics? Reach out.