Abstract: Ray Philipose, VP Olive Audience at Olive Media reviews the subjective nature of brand safety, and why it’s still early to fully trust the technology.
From the website: “Girls in Yoga Pants is a blog that covers the highly important topic of girls in yoga pants.”
Whether women wearing yoga pants is such an important topic that it requires dedicated blog coverage is a debate I’ll leave to others. But a quick scan of the site convinces me pretty quickly that this is not a great environment for premium brands. Yet as I look right now, there are a lot of very premium brands advertising here with display ads, and they’re clearly buying this media programmatically.
To be fair, this website has no nudity, no obscene language and no hate speech.
And further, a reputable advertising exchange has it available transparently for sale. This exchange has four levels of brand safety, and this website falls in its second level which is defined below:
Brand Safety Level 2 consists of sites which have a basic to premium design, layout, and construction, which is more than just text. Sites in this level may have some user-generated content, however it is not the primary focus of the site. Content will have a clearly intended audience.
This may be an accurate way of describing the website. But it highlights that brand safety is inherently subjective.
I don’t believe that all premium brands are comfortable being associated with lecherous shots of women in skintight clothing. I wouldn’t feel comfortable sending a client a screen grab of this website with a premium brand’s advertisements on it. That’s why at Olive we have an in-house team whose full time job it is to audit websites and ensure that they will meet our clients’ standards.
The technology in the programmatic landscape is wondrous, and we certainly make use of all the toys. But at this point, if a brand is truly concerned about brand safety, nothing beats a white list, and the value people bring in using their judgment on what environments are truly appropriate for brands.
