Brand Suitability in Video: Keys to Success
Zefr is a staunch supporter of GARM’s creation of foundational standards for all industry stakeholders to assume full responsibility for a more salutary media communications environment. The GARM standards represent the North Star that can effect clear benefits to brands, agencies, and platforms.
When thinking through a brand suitability strategy, there are key learnings that can be applied to ensure you’re working with a vendor that’s helping drive value for your best interests.
1) Objective Standards
Objective standards will increase accountability and reduce subjectivity. All members can now operate from common language to generate better success, effective measurement and more meaningful insights. As more money is being spent on digital by orders of magnitude, brands need to ensure their ads are being seen in responsible environments. The exploding scale of content in the marketplace has made curation a difficult task.
Learning: If a vendor is using their own taxonomy or their own language, make sure that you have a clear understanding of the methodology in order to understand if the solution is right for you.
2) Reducing Keyword Reliance
By adopting common GARM standards, there will be increased scale and diversity of content for brands and publishers. Rather than employing keyword blocklists, which often block good content, thereby reducing scale, GARM standards will help brands optimize by mitigating risk. At the same, publishers, whose content had been demonetized as a consequence of overly aggressive keyword block lists, will be duly rewarded. One audit of keyword lists for brand safety revealed that ~80% of videos that would be blocked actually registered as Low Risk GARM content.
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Learning: If a vendor is providing a semantic or keyword led approach, or is suggesting to use your own keyword blocklist — question them on how much missed reach and blocking of diverse content they may see.
3) Campaign Delivery and Scale
GARM standards will also enhance workflow efficiency and standardization. Evaluating brand suitability can be highly cumbersome as there are many nuances and differences for each platform’s native tools across Facebook, YouTube and the open web. GARM standards enable simpler, elegant workflows and reduce the need to constantly reinvent the wheel in creating inclusion lists. Additionally, automated GARM solutions identify content across risk levels without having to rely on manually curated inclusion lists, which often drive up CPMs as more content is restricted — a non-starter for programmatic buying.
Learning: If your vendor is sending static inclusion lists to you without the ability to dynamically activate across platforms, it can lead to poor workflow and campaign under delivery.
In Summary
Third-party verification companies like Zefr have emerged to facilitate these processes and improve accountability. As the industry adopts common GARM standards at critical mass, brands will be able to gain deeper insights in understanding and targeting content.
To learn more about Zefr and our involvement with the Global Alliance of Responsible Media (GARM), visit our website.
