Marketing Briefing: How brand safety has changed — even as Musk goes after GARM

Kristina Monllos August 20, 2024

0 5 minutes read

This Marketing Briefing covers the latest in marketing for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Tuesday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →

What happens next will likely take time and resources in the courts. This edition of the Marketing Briefing isn’t to predict what will happen, but to get a sense of the current brand safety conversation that’s happening between advertisers and agency execs now outside of the current lawsuit hubbub. How are marketers thinking about brand safety now, especially as the election cycle gets into full swing (with deepfake AI posts already afoot)? How has the conversation changed over the years?

It’s easy to assume that much of the topic is old hat for most marketers. Questions of brand safety and brand suitability have been commonplace as digital has come to dominate ad budgets. Marketers have been making inclusion and exclusion lists for years. Even so, some agency executives say that the need for brand safety education is more common than you’d think.

“A lot of people sort of know what it is,” said Deva Bronson, evp and head of media responsibility for dentsu, when asked to give a sense of the status quo for brand safety now. “There are still some folks that either don’t engage with brand safety at all or take a sort of ‘set it and forget it’ approach which then can lead to the false positives, false negatives in terms of tracking.”

To Bronson, that approach often leads to “outdated applications” of brand safety standards which is why dentsu helps educate clients with questions like, “when was the last time you checked your settings?” during brand safety check ups. “We recommend that our clients check their settings at least monthly, if not quarterly,” said Bronson.

Others say the terminology has shifted when talking to clients about brand safety. “I feel like ‘brand safety’ as a term might not be as popular as it used to be,” said Megha Parikh, head of strategy at VML, when asked about the status of brand safety today. Instead of using the term “brand safety,” clients will instead question whether or not something is “on brand for us” or ask, “Is it worth the risk to be in that space or talk about that subject?,” explained Parikh. “It’s almost like clients don’t want to say ‘safety’ because it feels a little 2010. But really what we’re talking about is like, ‘is this something that would be positive for my brand or not?’”

The conversation of brand safety today for some is often one of risk tolerance, per Parikh. For example, reaching younger consumers, particularly Gen Z, where they are spending their time — even if that is a riskier platform. For some marketers, “getting people’s attention is more important than always being brand safe,” said Parikh.

There’s also more of an understanding from both the consumer and marketers that the current online environment is more fraught and that brand content can end up in places that would be questionable, according to Parikh.

Understanding the “vibe” of a platform over the content of the platform is a key point that’s come up for clients at Rain the Growth Agency, according to Shuree Jones, group director, paid social and influencer media, Rain The Growth Agency. “When we say ‘the vibes,’ what we mean by that is the propensity for people to go off the rails,” said Jones. “Do we have a good view of if there would be a large piece of content that gets circulated that we could potentially be next to that will grow, grow and grow and sort of incite this some really emotional reaction. That’s more of the concern when it comes to platform to platform.”

3 Questions with Nicole Williams, vp of brand and product marketing for ByHeart, an infant nutrition company

What’s your biggest challenge?

Adapting to this category [of infant nutrition]. I’ve worked in a lot of other categories where you have the license and liberty to say or do what you want in a bit of a riskier way. But, we are operating in both a highly regulated category and the stakes are incredibly high because we are taking care of babies.

Measurement and attribution are an industry-wide challenge. How are you working through that?

Being an omnichannel brand, there’s aspects to our marketing mix that we can track. If someone is served an ad on X site or through Facebook or whatever it is, we’re able to see whether they came to our website, converted, dropped off, follow that journey. But we lose that visibility when it comes to someone converting, let’s say at retail, if they’re going to shop at a Target store or also if we use more traditional or multiple channels. There’s some means for being able to track it, but it’s a lot less transparent or visible to see, “Because we ran this billboard, this is the outcome.” So making the case for those channels, making the case for budget all those types of things, it’s tough.

How do you make the case for budget and investment in those channels that aren’t as trackable? How do you navigate?

It’s not a perfect science and it’s never exactly right. But I do think that there is an importance in reminding and setting an understanding that in order for our lower funnel efforts to really execute and operate in a way that’s sufficient, we need to have a large pool of people who are aware of us and who understand who we are. Especially as a new business, awareness is incredibly important. Broadening that pool requires investment and spend in some of those upper funnel channels and tactics that are sometimes less trackable. But we will see the downstream impact. — Kimeko McCoy

By the numbers

Influencer marketing is maturing, with advertisers leveraging not just creators, but their content and likeness by way of creator licensing to get the most bang for their buck. Meaning, a brand could take a creator’s video, license the creator’s likeness, or intellectual property, and put paid dollars behind that post. Notably, the rise of AI has pushed influencers to read their contracts more carefully, wary of AI’s impact on content usage rights. That said, a new report from #paid, a marketplace for connecting creators and brands, reveals the efficacy of created licensed ads. See key figures from the report below:

Created licensed ads are 5.4 times more efficient as compared to all Facebook ad CPMs.
Created licensed ads are 1.5 times more efficient compared to all TikTok ad CPM.
They’re also 6 times more cost-efficient at achieving clicks than brand search ads. — Kimeko McCoy

Quote of the week

“The historical issue with regard to women’s sports was that it was not presented in media that was easy to consume — it got lousy time slots. It was put on secondary channels within media ecosystems. As a result, people didn’t have the opportunity to see how great women’s sports are.”

— Ally CMO Andrea Brimmer when asked about how the dynamic with women’s sports is changing to reach parity with men’s sports as more brands invest.