Brand Safety First

With the increase in “fake news” and all the noise around more extreme political sites, PMG has been intensifying its efforts around content monitoring and brand safety as an agency. Historically, nearly all hate speech content has mostly been race or religion based.  In the past few months, we have seen this evolve to also include political-based hate speech content such as breitbart.com and lastresistance.com.

Although a lot of ground work has been done between DSPs and ad exchanges/SSPs to detect this type of content, politically based hate speech is new and one that not a lot of ad exchanges/SSPs have eliminated/blocked completely.

AppNexus was the first ad exchange/SSP to remove Breitbart from their inventory pool back in November 2016. Google and Facebook banned content over hate speech, and Twitter suspended high-profile accounts associated with the alt-right movement. That said, we expect more media vehicles to start taking the stand against this type of content.

PMG works closely with media partners to ensure zero impressions are served on this kind of content and has put in place multiple protection settings to maintain brand safety. The following are best practices applied to all media programs:

We only work with DSPs who offer brand safety filters as part of their offering.  Where multiple levels of proactive protection exist, we default to the maximum level of brand safety the platform will allow.

We only work with ad exchange/SSP partners who have strict processes in place to combat fraud and brand safety, pre-impression.  They also have strict pre-screening processes in place before a publisher is allowed to join their network.

A list of universally blocked websites is maintained and updated for all PMG clients in real-time based on data from across our portfolio of brands and campaigns. A proprietary crawler tool is used to compliment our manual additions to the agency blacklist.

We leverage pre-bid targeting through multiple technology partners to exclude undesirable content from ad serving before we bid in the auction.

Brand safety comes first as this will influence current and potential customer’s opinion about your brand!