Published on the 20/04/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
Companies that want to protect their brand online might have to make difficult choices regarding audience reach…
Tools which allow online advertisers to monitor where and how their messages are seen are making it easier to ensure marketing dollars are well directed. But there are still some very difficult decisions to make.
Stephen Dolan, Asia Pacific managing director of Integral Ad Science, explained that brand safety measures, which track where an advert is placed – for example on a porn website, or on a reputable news site – was measured by its tools on a scale between 0 and 1000. “Disney might weed out everything that falls below 850,” said Dolan – though he acknowledged that would exclude everything bar about 5 percent of the online inventory.
A bank meanwhile might be satisfied with a brand safety score of 600-650. But he stressed that it was important to be mindful of the audience you were trying to reach.
“If you are a cosmetics company and targeting youth, then if you went for brand safety of 650 you wouldn’t reach those guys. For 18-24 year old men you need to bring down your scores even further because those guys are more active on content that’s a little more racy.”
According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, in 2014 the Australian online advertising market was worth $4.6 billion, up 16 percent on the previous year. Integral Ad Science offers tools that measure the viewability, fraud and brand safety of online advertisement opportunities, allowing companies to decide how to invest their marketing dollars.
“Viewability measures where the ad is on the page and how long it is in view,” said Dolan, while brand safety helped an organisation decided which locations were most appropriate. “You hear numerous stories about brands being in places they shouldn’t be. Where the story is violent or an upsetting catastrophe it’s not the best time to be advertising and selling. This allows you to block the ad from appearing and show a blank ad.”
The company has also released a new fraud detection model that it claims can protect users from locating ads on sites where traffic is largely bot driven, and in March it acquired Veenome which analyses online video content for brand safety and viewability.
Dolan said that using the services would typically add 5-15 cents onto the cost of buying the media in the first place.
The company also offers its Traq (True Advertising Quality) composite measure of around a dozen different advertisement measurements – the lower the Traq score the worse the advertisement. Dolan explained that it was akin to a star rating for online advertisements, but acknowledged that Australian organisations were currently instead opting for simpler measures of brand safety or viewability data to inform their spending decisions rather than the more comprehensive composite measure.
