Protecting brands in the evolving digital landscape

Since brands first began advertising, they have cared about the environments in which they are appearing. With TV, it has been common practice for decades for advertisers to use ‘Do Not Air’ lists to keep their media buys away from content that doesn’t align with their brand values. They have also been able to review the delivery of their ads to confirm the context in which they ran. And yet somehow as digital advertising emerged, there has been an expectation that advertisers will manage without the same degree of control and transparency. The rapid evolution of the digital ecosystem has created opportunities for brands to connect with their customers in more personalised, meaningful ways, but it has also caused some frustrations.

Advertisers have been crying out for more control, transparency and accountability from the digital media partners with whom they spend their money. But no single advertiser or agency has the sway to drive the fundamental change to their technologies required to provide it. That is why Omnicom Media Group created The Council for Accountability & Standards in Advertising (CASA). This council is a collaboration between OMG, our clients and our valued partners to give advertisers back the control over where their ads are appearing and to whom. And the reassurance that their media partners are enforcing rigorous content moderation policies to benefit users and brands alike.
 

Improving accountability & standards

As new players enter a cluttered market they will understandably seek to move quickly and differentiate themselves from their competition. While this can be great for business, it can mean that less consideration has gone into the long-term impacts of advertising with said business. Unique ad formats and metrics on different platforms within one channel can make consistent reporting incredibly challenging. Insufficient content moderation means brands suffering reputational damage when their ads appear next to hate speech, misinformation and any number of high-risk categories of content. Meanwhile bad actors have taken advantage of the opacity of the digital landscape to make millions through ad fraud and made-for-advertising sites.

These problems exist across an ever-increasing number of channels as the lines continue to blur between digital and above-the-line. For this reason, CASA is now organised into five workstreams focusing on Connected TV, Out-of-Home, Retail, Supply-Side Platforms and Social. Alongside these five workstreams, CASA is built on five pillars which represent fundamental advertiser rights we believe our media partners should cater for. We believe advertisers have the right to:

1. Control where their ads will appear
2. Determine the audience who will see them
3. Know how and where their ads were delivered and to whom, and why they cost what they did
4. Have confidence they are only paying for impressions served to human beings
5. Understand a seller’s content policies and have confidence they are being enforced

These trickle down into specific focus areas for each workstream with suggested platform remedies. For example, we aim to bring the buy and sell sides of the industry closer together to enable curation of SSP inventory at a more granular level and to ensure up-to-date RTB protocols to prevent fraud. And with retail partners, developing incrementality measurement solutions to give advertisers better visibility of the contribution retail data is making to conversions further down the funnel. The pillars are focused on the areas that we know matter most to our clients, but we have intentionally steered away from being too prescriptive in order to allow our media partners the freedom to create solutions that work for their business.

We are working closely with long-term partners across these workstreams - such as Nectar360, Tesco Media & Insight Platform powered by dunnhumby and Rakuten - to increase trust and put control back in the hands of advertisers.
 

Social in the spotlight

In the social space, CASA has made huge progress since it was founded in 2020. That year, brand safety and suitability were thrust into the spotlight as hate speech and misinformation proliferated across social platforms in response to Black Lives Matter and the Trump/Biden election in the US. We heard time and time again from our clients that the risks posed to their brand were becoming unacceptable, so much so that many chose to pull back on social spends or pause altogether.

Omnicom Media Group saw the need to drive positive change across the industry. We formed our first set of pillars, all focused on control and transparency around the nature of content ads were appearing against on social media. For three years since, we have worked closely with the global brand safety teams at Reddit, Meta, Snap and others to help create solutions which cater for fundamental advertiser rights. For example, in March 2023, for the first time, Meta released feed inventory controls allowing clients to select from Expanded, Moderate or Limited Inventory based on their risk appetite.

And the programme has encouraged closer collaboration between the major social networks and our valued verification partners such as DoubleVerify, Zefr and IAS. This year alone we’ve seen the release of multiple new integrations, giving clients new-found confidence that platform content moderation policies are being enforced and controls are effective. This collaboration between agency, client and platform has been so effective that it’s been recognised by the Global Alliance for Responsible Media and many of these newly released solutions have been built around their own brand safety and suitability framework.

These product developments and integrations have already had a huge positive impact for many of our clients. Some brands with highly risk-averse profiles have been able to start advertising on certain social platforms for the first time, confident that they are now able to effectively control the types of content they are appearing against. Others have seen the rates at which their ads appear against brand unsuitable content decrease significantly, easing fears about risks to brand reputation.

Paid advertising is the lifeblood of big tech companies and has fuelled the creation a free internet, bringing connection, a voice and education to communities that were historically cut off from mainstream media. There is no doubt that these companies have done good and have ambitions to continue to do so. But in a race for growth and differentiation, user and brand safety can be inadvertently sidelined. There is a balance to be struck. It’s only with agencies, brands, big tech and media owners working together that we can continue to create unique, compelling experiences for users in a responsible way. Long term, that increased trust between brands and the businesses with which they advertise will create even stronger relationships, benefiting all players within the media ecosystem.