About Brand and Ad Safety

[nchrys]

Hello,

Brand Safety is paramount in advertising. Even running campaigns for performance, you don't want to hurt your overall brand. This is true on the publisher and on the advertiser side and both are very sensitive to it:

• Publisher Side - Ad safety: the ability for a publisher to enforce a policy on the type of ads that can be displayed on its properties. (E.g. NSFW policy, Advertising from the competition).
• Advertiser Side - Brand safety: the ability to select publishing websites according to their policy. (E.g. only publish on widely considered "high quality" publishers).

Advertisers and/or Publishers want to have strict control over it and be able to audit it. Approximation is not an option in this case since a few instances can damage your brand. Aggregated reporting would only work if there is enough identical reports. This seems to be a clear flaw in the reporting capabilities.

What could be done to ensure Brand Safety in the framework of this proposal?

[michaelkleber]

Hi Nicolas: Can you explain how this API fits into your Brand Safety story? From both the publisher and advertiser points of view, I would expect brand safety questions to be of great importance before rendering an ad, which isn't this API's domain at all.

[nchrys]

Hi Michael,

Thank you for your response.

Hi Nicolas: Can you explain how this API fits into your Brand Safety story? From both the publisher and advertiser points of view, I would expect brand safety questions to be of great importance before rendering an ad, which isn't this API's domain at all.

The Brand Safety story is two-fold. The central piece is indeed at bidding/rendering time. However, reporting is key for auditing purposes. How can you be sure that your brand was kept safe at rendering time if you don't have access to the right reporting? The question I raised was related to this second point.

For the Brand/Ad Safety use case, the reporting requirement would be the following:

• Aggregation Level: Full Band Safety auditing capabilities would require a very granular reporting (Campain x showed products x specific page /URL). Campaign x Publisher Domain sounds like the bare minimum both sides can work with.
• Delay: Short (ideally hours), so that if something problematic is happening, we want to see it appearing in the reporting fast and act on it.
• Noise sensibility: the data can be binary (ie there was at least an ad on this campaign x domain or no ad at all) but there can be no noise added