Brand Safety Worries Holding Back Display Advertising By $2 Billion
By Anna Johnson on May 4th, 2010Winterberry Group, a New York based consulting firm, reckons brand safety concerns may be holding U.S. Internet marketers back from investing as much as $2 billion in online display advertising.
‘Brand safety’ – the degree to which a brand maintains its positioning, standards and integrity – may be undermined where the brand appears on webpages with surrounding content that clashes with the brand. This can arise where ads are placed through ad networks comprising all kinds of websites and content, including user-generated content, and advertisers have little or no control over where their ads appear.
In its white paper on the subject, ‘Beyond the Grey Areas: Transparency, Brand Safety and the Future of Online Advertising’ Winterberry Group identifies five degrees of brand safety risk ranging from “message misalignment” (advertising message appears out-of-context from surrounding Web page content) to outright “dangerous” placement (advertising appears on pages that defy baseline societal norms with respect to taste, respect and basic courtesy).
The report states:
“Anecdotally, marketers tell stories of botched campaigns, disastrous brand exposures and quick, last-minute media plan revisions. What they report far less often, though, is the extent to which they deflect ad dollars from the digital display channel – or hold back from committing spending in the first place because of anticipated challenges with regard to risky placement.”
According to Winterberry Group over 95 percent of Internet marketers would invest more in display ad spending if transparency and brand safety issues could be resolved, with the total potential growth at 10 to 20 percent of current display budgets – or as much as approximately $2 billion annually.
