Twitter's current travails with advertisers bring focus on brand safety

Focused approach to media targeting, using third-party verification tools among measures advertisers are adopting

Twitter’s current travails with advertisers, with many of them hitting the pause button on advertising, has brought into focus the issue of brand safety. A recent study by Gurugram-based mFilterit, a company that works with advertisers on improving brand safety, says that at least 20-25 per cent of the digital advertising budget of a company is wasted because ads are sitting in brand-unsuitable environments.

Twitter, for instance, has had to deal with multiple advertiser calls for safety in the past, too.

A month ago, global advertisers such as Coca-Cola, Walt Disney and Mazda had to temporarily suspend advertising on Twitter after their ads were spotted next to offensive content.

In the current round, big spenders such as Mondelez, Pfizer, the Volkswagen group, General Mills and General Motors have hit the pause button. Ad and media agencies are also advising their clients to go slow with advertising on the platform.

Experts say that Twitter is not the only channel having to contend with brand unsafety in advertising. Google and Facebook, which are bigger digital advertising platforms in India, face similar issues.

The problem has become even more acute now, with uncertainty prevailing in the tech world. The content curation teams, for instance, were amongst those that were given pink slips in India as well as internationally at Twitter last week.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has already indicated that it will lay off workers this week to reduce costs. So, where does that leave brand safety?

“There are multiple safeguards that companies can put in place when advertising on social media,” says Abhishek Chaturvedi, senior vice-president and head of planning at Digitas India, which is part of the Publicis Groupe, a French multinational advertising and public relations company.

“One is to take a focused approach to media targeting. Know where your ads are going and the target audience that is being served through the campaign to the last detail,” Chaturvedi says. “The second is to use third-party verification tools, if needed, to ensure ads are served in a brand-safe or suitable environment. And the third is to understand what social media and digital platforms are doing to ensure brand safety.”

For instance, platforms such as Google, Facebook, YouTube and ShareChat have both manual and automated checks to weed out unsafe content. Automated tools include embedded algorithms that identify keywords, pictures and content that are unsafe and block its display.

Google also deploys sophisticated tools that crawl through its content catalogue to weed out unsafe content. Some other players such as ShareChat and Twitter allow users to flag off offensive content, which is then weeded out accordingly. As such, most digital platforms have large backend teams that monitor content 24X7 and purge unsuitable content.

Yet, unsafe content does manage to slip through the cracks, as Nachiket Deole, head of sales, India, at DoubleVerify, a US-based company that offers software solutions to advertisers around brand safety and suitability, explains. “The need for tools that can safeguard ad placements in a brand-suitable environment becomes even more important in an ever-evolving content ecosystem. We do this by first understanding the requirements of the advertiser, where he/she wants to be present and where he/she does not want to be,” Deole says. “Based on their policies, advertisers can deploy brand suitability strategies by various tools like inclusion-exclusion list of sites that we help in preparing, keyword blocking and content categories that can aid brand suitability.”

Specifically, DoubleVerify’s technology intercepts an advertisement before it is delivered to the target audience on a platform. The technology evaluates the impression for suitability on the basis of the parameters laid out by the advertiser before it is finally delivered to the target audience on a social media channel or website.

Apart from DoubleVerify, there are players such as US-headquartered Integral Ad Science and mFilterit, which also provide a suite of products and services that address issues ranging from brand safety to ad fraud and online reputation risk.

But challenges still abound with fraudsters and those posting unsafe content continuing to thrive amid a growing digital landscape in India.

A GroupM advertising report notes that digital advertising will touch Rs 48,000 crore by the end of this calendar year on the back of advertising activity across categories from consumer goods to retail and e-commerce, telecom and automotive. Digital advertising in terms of size was Rs 36,000 crore in 2021 in India, GroupM said.

The growth rate seen in 2022 versus 2021 will be 33 per cent, GroupM says. This, it adds, is in line with the pace of growth seen in digital advertising over the last few years.

Safeguard tools for ads

• Inclusion-exclusion list of sites based on where the brand wants or doesn’t want to be seen
• Keyword blocking and content categories to aid brand suitability
• Tech to intercept advertisement before it is put out on a platform. The tech evaluates impression for suitability before ad is delivered to target audience on social media channel/website
• Products and services to address issues ranging from brand safety to ad fraud and online reputation risk