GroupM’s Brand Safety team has released the handbook for brand safety. This safety handbook promises to give you an overview of the GroupM Brand Safety practice, and how the agency operates along with some of the important trends and changes that GroupM has observed.
GroupM defines Brand Safety as any risk that an advertiser may face in the digital supply chain. The three main categories of risk are financial, reputational, and legal.
GroupM estimates the risk of total ad fraud to be $22.4B globally, with an average fraud rate at 10.8%. Publishers of harmful content rely on the brilliant ignorance of advanced artificial intelligence to find readers who will like and share their vitriolic or illegal content.
The report suggest that brands must approach contextual brand safety with zero tolerance for advertising placed adjacent to harmful content – while it’s hard to ensure that this will result in zero risk, it will certainly help mitigate potential issues.
Social platforms are at once the biggest risk environment and the least open to independent, third-party measurement.
In an email interaction with Medianews4u, Joe Barone, Managing Partner, Brand Safety Americas GroupM informed us about the key findings of the Brand Safety Handbook created by GroupM.
On how has the brand safety team at GroupM collected the data that highlights best practices for brands to follow on brand safety, Joe Barone, Managing Partner, Brand Safety Americas, GroupM said, “The GroupM Brand Safety Best Practices have been developed based on ten years of engagement in the space, constant re-evaluation of available technology, and deep immersion in the real-world issues and approaches applied by our agency teams worldwide.”
Clearing the misconception that brands are still unaware of the dangers of ad fraud, Joe said, “We do not believe awareness of ad fraud is a major problem. We work hard to educate our agency teams and our clients, plus trade media coverage of the issue helps to raise awareness.”
On the contribution of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media and their role of taking on ad fraud, the lack of common digital measurement system Joe said, “GARM is focused on contextual brand safety, which is a reputational risk to brand equity, plus a consumer protection issue. Fraud is a different type of risk which is part of GroupM’s overall brand safety practice but is not central to GARM’s mission.”
While the report suggests that the risk of total ad fraud is at $22.4B globally, with an average fraud rate at 10.8%, Joe shared who is to be blamed for the ad fraud. He said, “Note that over 80% of the quoted ad fraud rate is in China, so the 10.8% avg IVT rate is heavily skewed. Major markets like NA and EMEA are in the 2-3% range. The blame is of course on the criminals that perpetrate this crime.”
“Our job is to make sure we identify the fraud, avoid it if we can, and withhold payment to sellers for any fraud that does appear on our plans.”
On how are brands like Facebook and Google protecting consumer data and whether other brands need to fear or worry about any brand safety issues from these internet giants, Joe said, “These platforms are working hard to improve their consumer data protection capability, but clearly they haven’t cracked it yet. The skepticism is warranted.”
On which are the best practices for organizations to follow uncovering the financial, reputation and legal risks of ads which help advertisers reach their target consumers, Joe said, “In a nutshell, our clients should only pay for ads that are seen by real people in their target audience in an appropriate editorial environment.”
Link to download the GroupM Brand Safety Handbook: https://www.groupm.com/news/groupm-brand-safety-guide-2019.
