Brand Safety: Seventeen principals in the critical area
The zulu5 company and the Digital Ad Trust association have published a joint study on the brand safety of Swiss advertisers. Many of them play out their advertising on potentially harmful websites.
For the study, which zulu5 conducted in collaboration with the Digital Ad Trust Verein in the second half of 2021, over 1 million national and international potentially brand-damaging Internet domains were monitored by zulu5 in the period July-December 2021 and examined for advertising placements by the top 100 Swiss advertising clients. An increased proportion of advertisements on potentially brand-damaging websites was observed for 52 advertisers. For 17 advertisers, it was a significant proportion of ad placements.
Brand safety as a key issue
Brand safety is one of the key topics for the Digital Ad Trust, which was founded by the three associations IAB Switzerland Association (IAB), Leading Swiss Agencies (LSA) and Schweizer Werbe-Auftraggeberverband (SWA). The new Brand Safety Report, which was produced in collaboration with zulu5, a company specializing in brand safety, is a comprehensive report for which digital advertising from the 100 largest Swiss advertising clients and exposed sectors was examined and analyzed in terms of brand safety. The report distinguishes between legal safety (i.e. advertising environments that violate the law or advertising guidelines) and brand suitability, which refers to brand-specific safety requirements. The zulu5 crawlers searched the Internet in the second half of 2021 using an "outside-in" approach and combed through websites to audit them and record which ads appear on potentially brand-damaging pages.
Measures required?
The analysis showed that the majority of the top 100 advertisers in Switzerland fall into an exposed range of between two and ten percent, i.e., that two to ten percent of the observed advertisements were played on potentially harmful environments, which would require certain measures depending on the risk profile. The situation is more critical for advertisers with more than ten percent of exposed cases. Here, a total of seventeen market participants were found to be exposed to an extent that would require active measures to reduce it.
Most cases of potentially brand-damaging advertising come from the finance, telecommunications, service and retail sectors. This is hardly surprising, since the greatest advertising pressure of the top 100 advertisers is on these industries. The high exposed share of critical ad impressions of digital and household compared to their advertising pressure was striking. In general, it can be concluded that the risk of advertising in potentially brand-damaging environments correlates with increased advertising pressure and, above all, broad distribution.
The Digital Ad Trust association will inform the heavily affected advertising clients individually about their respective results.
The complete Brand Safety Report can be here can be downloaded.
