Brand Safety Defined: 2020 the Year of the Consumer

The Brand Safety Institute is proud to present the third, and latest, installment of the Brand Safety Defined series of white papers: 2020 the Year of the Consumer

The term “Brand Safety” describes 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.
-Defining Brand Safety, 2018

In 2018, the Brand Safety Institute released the white paper series Defining Brand Safety. The paper used over two dozen executive interviews to put context to a loosely defined term Brand Safety. The second in the series, Defining Brand Safety: Execution Challenges we 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, we interviewed members of the Brand Safety Institute Advisory Board to understand current trends and we found that in 2019, many advertising supply chain organizations were putting in a number of controls strategies and processes as it relates to direct consumer engagement safety. This included investments in tools and processes optimizing for advertising adjacency and content avoidance issues and consumer privacy safe guards, in particular GDPR and CCPA.

While Ad Fraud is still tops in investments, research demonstrates that nearly 70% of this bot traffic is the direct result of malware attacks infecting consumers computers and mobile devices.

To better prepare executives in the industry and because BSI has been listening to the industry leaders, today we are releasing the next round of Brand Safety Officer training as part of our certification curriculum.