Top Brand Safety Execs Name 2020 As Year Of The Consumer

BSI White Paper Outlines Opportunities & Challenges for New Year; Organization Releases Final Six Modules for BSI Curriculum

WASHINGTON, DC – November 14, 2019 – In a new white paper from the Brand Safety Institute (BSI), top brand safety executives who serve on the BSI Advisory Board said they believed 2020 would become known as “The Year of the Consumer,” as companies across the digital advertising supply chain work to better address consumer expectations, mitigate the consequences of recent brand safety and privacy crises, and comply with new consumer-focused legislation in California and elsewhere.

“Sometimes you need hindsight to see a trend emerging, but 2020 is flashing its defining theme in neon lights as companies focus on consumer needs,” said Mike Zaneis, co-founder of the Brand Safety Institute. “Interviews with some of the industry’s leading brand safety voices found a common commitment to address the impact of past failures, navigate complicated regulatory changes, and protect their brands from new and emerging threats in the digital advertising ecosystem.”

In addition to “Brand Safety Defined: 2020 The Year of the Consumer,” BSI also unveiled the final six modules in its first-year curriculum, which reinforce the consumer focus of the white paper. Those modules include ad-supported piracy, ad quality and experience, consumer choice, malware, verification, and the role of the Brand Safety Officer. The new modules complete the curriculum announced earlier this year with the first four modules: an introduction to brand safety, ad fraud, ad adjacency, and knowing your partners.

“Thanks to the significant research done by BSI over the last two years, we understand that brand safety executives manage a complicated and multi-faceted set of issues, and the BSI curriculum is designed to educate and empower the professionals who deal with those varied challenges,” said Rachel Nyswander Thomas, Chair of the BSI Board of Advisors. “We are excited to finalize the BSI curriculum and move toward full implementation of this important certification program.”

In 2018, the Brand Safety Institute released the first white paper in its series, “Defining Brand Safety”. The paper was based on more than two dozen executive interviews to help the industry find a common understanding around the loosely defined term of “brand safety.” Based on those interviews, the white paper proposed a definition of brand safety as “the controls that companies in the digital advertising supply chain employ to protect brands against negative impacts to the brand’s consumer reputation associated with specific types of content, criminal activity, and/or related loss of return on investment.”

The second white paper in the BSI series, Defining Brand Safety: Execution Challenges, helped quantify the brand safety investment made by leading companies and uncovered costs controls and areas for buyers to focus on maximizing their bang for the buck.

In the third and latest installment, "Brand Safety Defined – 2020: the Year of the Consumer", BSI interviewed members of the Brand Safety Institute Advisory Board to understand current trends. The white paper found that many advertising supply chain organizations implemented a number of controls strategies and processes in 2019 related to direct consumer engagement and safety. This included investments in tools and processes optimizing for advertising adjacency and content avoidance issues and consumer privacy safeguards, in particular around new European and California regulatory regimes.

The full white paper, Brand Safety Defined – 2020: The Year of the Consumer, can be found at https://www.brandsafetyinstitute.com/hubfs/BSI-Defining-Brand-Safety-Year-of-the-Consumer.pdf.

About The Brand Safety Institute

The Brand Safety Institute was founded to support education on and the practice of Brand Safety in the Digital Advertising Supply Chain. Through a program of research, education, and certification BSI offers knowledge, tools, best practices, and a community of peers to the individuals charged with championing the cause of Brand Safety. For more information on BSI please visit brandsafetyinstitute.com.

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