Advertisers biggest challenge: brand safety

Advertisers see brand safety - in all its many facets - as some of their top priorities, and biggest challenges.

That's according to the "The State of Digital Advertising 2019", released by Marin Software and detailed by Digital Content Next.

Not surprisingly, advertisers number one priority was increasing brand awareness. Just below that was "Enhancing the customer experience". That is a real brand safety issue where the type of ad, and/or it's adjacency to controversial or stolen content, can influence a consumers perception of a brand.

As for the trends they see in the industry, advertisers still see brand safety at the top of the list.

A total of 22% of digital advertisers indicated that both video advertising and information security in the form of data privacy, tracking restrictions, brand safety, and ad blocking will have the largest impact on their businesses this year. Within social specifically, marketers surveyed cited attribution/cross-device measurement (28%), generating quality creative (26%) and brand safety (26%) as their top concerns.

Ad fraud was also a concern for advertisers, coming in at 20% of respondents.

In all, it shows the scope of the brand safety challenge for the brands themselves, and highlights the need for people in their organizations to understand the issues, and know how to define, implement, and evangelize for best practices.