by Carey Finn (@carey_finn) Beyond concerns about contextual Brand Safety, ad fraud and viewability, it’s overarching issues of digital integrity that are keeping marketers up at night, says John Montgomery, global executive vice president of brand safety at advertising media giant, GroupM. “I think marketers are worried about that, and making sure that they’re advertising on responsible media channels. Our conversations [around brand safety] have changed to: how can we make the web a better place? And how do we ensure that the web is safe for our children?”

Citing the use of Facebook to incite violence in Myanmar and disinformation problems in Ukraine as examples of how badly digital media channels can be misused, Montgomery emphasises the importance of collaboration among media organisations globally — including those in adland. “It’s much more important than brand safety; it’s about public safety and social responsibility,” he says.

Fighting fake news

Fighting fake news during a global pandemic highlights the difficulty of the task. “Everyone is worried about disinformation, not just brands,” he says. “We use technology where possible to detect disinformation but rely on the media we use, especially the social platforms, to be as vigilant about this as possible. Because of covid-19, platforms have a depleted force of moderators but are trying to use technology to elevate and prioritise information from reliable sources like the WHO [World Health Organisation].”

The brand-safety conversation has evolved considerably over the last decade, remarks Montgomery: “Ten years ago, what we were doing was making sure that our clients’ ads were kept away from adult content. Brand safety, an umbrella term for mitigating any risk that a brand might face in the digital supply chain, really came to the fore in 2014, when we were trying to establish a new currency for digital. Viewability was the issue of the day for a year or two. Between an ad being served and an ad being rendered, many things can happen: there could be technical issues, the ad could appear in a window behind another window, and so on. We found that [a fraction] of ads were actually viewable.”

After boosting viewability, the next major risk to be focused on was ad fraud, says Montgomery. This was addressed through the application of technologies such as those provided by DoubleVerify and White Ops. “In the background, there were all sorts of other issues, like IP infringement, contractual compliance, ad blocking and other threats,” he says. However, these could be considered minor compared to viewability, ad fraud and contextual brand safety.

“Emotionally most important”

GroupM was reminded of the significance of the latter in early 2017, when The Times in the UK ran a five-page story on how big brands were, purportedly, inadvertently funding extremist organisations through the placement of their digital advertising. “I would say that’s still the one that’s emotionally most important to clients,” he says. “For more than three years, we’ve been trying to address those [risks], and doing so quite successfully.”

Today, with the proliferation of user-generated content (UGC), particularly on social media, brands are faced with both exciting new opportunities — and risks, says Montgomery. “While we’re using technology to make sure that our ads don’t appear in inappropriate places, and social media [screening] tools are much better than they were before, there’s still the risk of disruptive content on the web — and I’m talking about hate speech, bullying, disinformation and fake news. All of those things are a worry. It’s not so much that brands might appear adjacent to them but because it undermines the integrity of digital as a whole.”

Then there are the coronavirus-related concerns. “Clients obviously want to be cautious about appearing adjacent to grim news,” he says. “There has been concern that, because the majority of news is actually about the pandemic [at the moment], that by using keyword avoidance, online news has been suffering. Some are pointing fingers at the technology provided by companies like Oracle, Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify as the reason why the press has experienced demonetisation at the time of the virus. But the technology is not the enemy.

Semantic ad avoidance tech

“In fact, used properly, semantic ad avoidance technology can encourage advertising back into news by advertising adjacent to content that clients are comfortable with, while staying away from news they want to avoid. Advertisers may want to avoid covid-19-related news when it is about death tolls, or misinformation about miracle cures, but could be more comfortable about general daily news about the virus and how it is affecting people’s lifestyles.”

GroupM has communicated with teams about the negative effects of news demonetisation and how to use semantic avoidance strategically and in a minimally invasive manner, says Montgomery. “Research completed [in late April 2020] indicates that 92% of teams approached (80 brands responded) either do not block news at all, or use semantic avoidance only to block negative, grim news like ‘dying with COVID’ or similar. Fully 22 brand teams changed their strategy based on advice from the brand safety team.”

One engine for long-term, broad digital change is the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), an organisation in which Montgomery and his colleagues play a leading role. “GroupM and a couple of clients thought it would be a really good idea to get the entire industry around single positioning for brand safety,” he explains. “What was happening was GroupM and other agency groups and industry groups, like the IAB, WFA and every acronym you can think of, was approaching brand safety in their own well-meaning way. That meant that what Facebook and Google and the other guys were getting was a fragmented approach. They were trying to react to everybody’s needs and, of course, you can’t. So, for once, we as an industry collaborated. We got everyone around the same table, discussing the same issues.”

Areas of importance

GARM has identified various areas of importance, each with its own workstream and team, which includes representatives from major social media companies, to work on solutions, he says. One example of progress to date has been unifying the definition of objectionable content globally: “It may sound like a simple thing but if Google has a different definition to what Twitter has, to what everyone else has, how are you going to avoid placing your advertising against that? Now we have singular definitions that everybody agrees on. And there’s a brand safety floor, where everybody agrees that nothing underneath that floor is acceptable,” he says.

The work is underway but will never stop, says Montgomery. “It’s an ongoing thing, because as the internet evolves, new threats emerge and need to be addressed.”

See also

• #OpenForBusiness — Radar
• #CoronavirusSA — Radar
• #CoronavirusSA – Special Section

Carey Finn (@carey_finn) is a writer and editor with over decade and a half of industry experience, having covered everything from ethical sushi in Japan to the technicalities of roofing, agriculture, medical stuff and more. She’s also taught English and journalism, and dabbled in various other communications ventures along the way, including risk reporting. She is a contributing writer to MarkLives.com.

This MarkLives #CoronavirusSA special section contains coverage of how the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, and its resultant disease, covid-19, is affecting the advertising, marketing and related industries in South Africa and other parts of Africa, and how we are responding. Updates may be sent to us via our contact form or the email address published on our Contact Us page. Opinion pieces/guest columns must be exclusive.

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