“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Charles Cantu, CEO and founder at Reset Digital.
In theory, brand safety is supposed to prevent advertisers from associating their brands with violence, hate and other phenomena that could lead consumers to turn their backs on a brand. But in practice, brand safety has led many brands to turn their backs on a significant share of their consumers: historically underrepresented consumers and media owners, especially Black folks.
Brand safety’s detrimental impact on diverse, equitable and inclusive media goals is a question of automation gone wrong, ham-fisted implementation and industry leaders choosing the easy route. They haven’t been doing the legwork required to ensure avoiding anything vaguely controversial doesn’t come at the expense of DEI. We have to understand how we got here to fix it.
Let’s review how brand safety’s DEI problem has developed and the steps advertisers, agencies and brand safety organizations can take to overcome it.
Brand safety automation gone wrong
Brand safety tools have grown into something they never should have become: automated levers to block overly broad topics so that brands never buy media that could be at all controversial. But this could lead to brands blocking, say, “Black Lives Matter” content because they don’t want to be associated with divisive political news stories. That will end up shutting out all Black-owned and Black-centered media.
The consequences of overly broad brand safety automation tools are immense. In the aforementioned scenario, Black publishers will not get media spend, preventing them from thriving and delivering representative media to their audiences. Black consumers will not hear from the brand in question, and the advertiser will put itself in, dare I say, brand-unsafe ethical territory. It will also prevent itself from reaching a massive, culturally and economically influential swath of its potential customer base.
The same problem arises when advertisers and agencies shut out certain kinds of news, perhaps worrying that they don’t want to appear next to potentially upsetting or serious subject matter. For example, blocking news concerning race or even protests could block hundreds of Black-owned and operated media sites. Local radio stations and long-tail publishers could die due to these practices. And brands, even if they don’t realize it, will suffer from them, too. They’ll be missing out on possibly untapped audiences that could be driving growth.
Developing a more equitable and inclusive brand safety strategy
If marketers want to keep their brands safe without sucking the oxygen out of diverse media organizations, they need to transition from broad, automated blocklists to post-campaign analytics. Brand safety doesn’t need to be automated. Rather, brand safety tools can tell advertisers where their ads are running and compare that against the media organizations where they want to advertise. Using this intelligence, which could be compiled as often as daily, the advertiser can manually excise unsafe organizations and ensure it continues to work with diverse ones.
A better brand safety strategy doesn’t need to involve an immense amount of extra work for advertisers. They can leave it to their brand safety vendor to conduct analytics and advise them on organizations to avoid.
In addition, agencies, advertisers and brand safety organizations need to be more transparent about their brand safety practices and the organizations they are blocking. Operating in darkness puts underrepresented media at a disadvantage — they’re getting blocked and they don’t know why it’s happening, allowing shady practices to persist without scrutiny. By shining light on brand safety practices, the industry can come together to identify the scope of the problem as well as solutions.
Brand safety’s diversity problem is a people problem
Some will say that it’s technologically impossible to prevent brand safety from clashing with DEI goals. Advertisers need to avoid controversial media. If publishers owned by and featuring underrepresented groups are a casualty, there’s nothing executives can do.
This is untrue. Brand safety’s detrimental impact on DEI is only a technology problem from the perspective that technology providers aren’t diligently working to solve the problem. In other words, it’s a people problem. We can reengineer brand safety and media buying processes to protect brands without doing a disservice to underrepresented media owners, consumers, and brands.
With more transparency and a little more legwork, the digital media industry can meet its brand safety goals without letting them become a roadblock to meeting DEI goals. Publishers, consumers and advertisers will benefit. Surely, we can do the work required to achieve that result.
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