Brand Safety & Suitability: New Rules, New Regulation
Earlier this year, industry leaders from platforms, brands, agencies and tech companies got together to talk about the future of the ad industry. One of the key topics: brand suitability. As content becomes more diverse, brands and agencies are requiring more sophisticated controls in order to make responsible media decisions. In order to make this a reality, action is required.
Four of the leaders in the field, in a conversation moderated by GARM lead Rob Rakowitz, got together to discuss the future of brand responsibility and brand suitability. Below is a recap of the themes from their conversation:
1) Proactive vs. Reactive
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Since 2017, brand safety and content adjacency has often been highly reactive, with providers rushing to provide bandaids to protect brands. This has included adding current events to keyword blocklists that is unsustainable at scale.
With more sophisticated tools and GARM’s objective definitions in the market, it’s now time to reset, and take a proactive approach to the current climate. Companies that take a proactive approach by investing in R&D to understand content and suitability, and demand transparency, will be in the best position of success.
2) Objective vs. Subjective
Brand suitability and media responsibility has been hard to pin down because of the lack of consensus in the industry. This has led to little accountability, with every vendor and brand being graded by their own homework. Enter the Global Alliance of Responsible Media. With the GARM standards being driven throughout the industry, there is finally an objective framework brands can activate and measure their Suitability against. With this objectivity, the industry can spend more time focusing on building brands and achieving campaign success, and less time going through spreadsheets trying to understand the risk definition of every piece of content their brand ran against.
3) Collaborative vs. Siloed
The future of the industry won’t be solved by one party in a vacuum. There needs to be ongoing collaboration to ensure the ecosystem is able to thrive, which requires expertise on each part of the process from brands to agencies to platforms to third parties. GARM’s charter is to foster “uncommon collaboration,” which will encourage a new dialogue in the industry that moves us away from point solutions, and towards a common north star: making the media ecosystem more responsible.
To learn more about how Zefr’s data enables precise brand suitability, visit our website, and to learn more about Zefr’s involvement with the Alliance, continue checking Zefr’s GARM Hub.
