The growth of Internet as a medium has been unprecedented - from Horizontal Portals to Blogs, Videos, UGC and Social Media. As the medium evolves, every online marketer is concerned about transparency and brand safety. Questions that often bother advertisers and agencies are whether or not they are selecting the right channel or website for advertising and whether they are brand safe.

The last few years have seen a proliferation of advertising technology innovations: the agency trading desks, demand side platforms, ad exchanges, supply side platforms and real-time operators.

On the surface, it might seem quite simple; just select the known site where you can find your audience and serve the ads. But at the core of it, it becomes imperative to prevent the ad from appearing on negative news / keywords / pictures. Brand safety is about providing a demonstrably safe environment for brand advertisers to promote their message online; this could be achieved by sanitizing the ad space before the ad is served.It calls for a robust platform and a deep integration with all real-time bid aggregation points which would enable evaluation of billions of impressions a day for relevance.

By choosing relevant and safe destinations for each ad to be served, agencies can help their client’s safeguard their brand reputations. The buying process has to be robust enough for the media buyers and the clients to gain confidence. In this context, best practices need to be established to ensure everyone is aware of the frameworks to ensure accountability. Once safety tags are implemented with the campaign, the ad server serves or block ad based content on the page which is related to illegal content and copyright infringement, spyware/ malware, adult content, hate content and the like.

Publishers acknowledged a certain responsibility, but would note that the issue rolls right back to advertisers, demand-side platforms and agencies. In the end, we came out to two fundamental conclusions that I think make a lot of sense: The potential financial opportunity inherent in successfully addressing these issues is significant, and that solution is likely to come from one or more independent providers who won't be conflicted by the natural buy- or sell-side interests confronting the rest of the industry.

To help clients comprehensively, agencies should choose a solution that should article against blocked keywords for e.g. ‘murder’ and should be able to block ads on pages with inappropriate user comments in real time. In summation, brand safety and transparency should definitely be a top priority so as to ensure trust between agencies and clients. A standardized and relevant inventory helps in boosting the advertiser’s confidence.

After the consumer understands the proposition showing the advert any more is likely to have little effect on their propensity to visit the site or convert. This spend is wasted. Furthermore, if a consumer is shown creative a high number of times it is not only ineffectual, but can be damaging to the brand.

Many sites go out of their way to catch the eyes of the customers and yet leave out this important aspect of retaining the safety of the brand which can be easily avoided in this day and age. Brand integrity is crucial in both cases. But if the drug maker’s ad shows up in the wrong place--and you can imagine there are lots of wrong places in this instance--the marketer may find itself exposed to a host of issues, ranging from embarrassment to lost consumer confidence to even regulatory sanction

Customers are fickle and there is no loyalty especially in ecommerce where customers readily go to other websites that offer them cheaper products and better services. Therefore, retaining customers becomes important for a company. Losing customers due to fluctuating prices is unavoidable but it is also one of the foolish mistakes that brands make when they don’t monitor the advertisements being displayed on their pages and don’t sign up with a  company that can eliminate such incidents. Today there are companies that can help these brands eliminate such vital incidents and can monitor the advertisements.

The industry has evolved, technology and automated display trading has meant that there are many more businesses and trading models (AKA intermediaries) out there that facilitate the buying and selling ofdisplay media.

If agencies are finding brand safety a challenge when buying display advertising, then it’s important to also look at what their clients are thinking.