Protecting your brand’s reputation and ensuring brand safety has never been more critical. Businesses can be scorned or boycotted by consumers and the media for seemingly inappropriate views, actions, behavior, or associations, so it’s vital that audiences always view your brand in a positive light.
While you might safeguard your reputation on social media, you should also protect your name when advertising on digital audio platforms. For example, placing an ad in a show or episode perceived as controversial or morally unacceptable could cause a backlash and prevent consumers from purchasing your products and services.
Investing in brand safety can keep your company’s character “clean” and maintain trust with your audience. Learn more about how something called media intelligence ensures brand safety below.
What Is Brand Safety?
Brand safety in advertising means ensuring your brand is not associated with any content that audiences might perceive as offensive, indecent, unsuitable, or improper. For example, advertising your products on a website that promotes hate speech. Brand safety helps you protect your brand’s reputation and stops you from landing in hot water with media outlets that might criticize your decision to advertise on certain channels and with particular organizations.
Not many brands think about brand safety when advertising on digital audio platforms. However, buying ad space on podcast shows and episodes considered offensive could come back to bite you! So can placing ads on audiobooks by authors and publishing houses that audiences perceive inappropriate or morally repugnant. You should also be aware of whether your ads appear before or after artists or genres that audiences consider improper on music streaming channels like Spotify.
Brand safety across advertising platforms and third-party mentions is critical. It helps you maintain your brand’s image and reputation. It also protects you against adverse reactions from audiences who might associate your ad with harmful or inappropriate podcasts, audiobooks, songs, and other digital audio content. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of that out there!
Brand safety in advertising is important because promoting your offerings in the wrong digital audio space can cause trouble for your brand. In 2021, podcaster Sofia Franklyn lost several advertisers after she verbally attacked the Disney star Mollee Gray on her show. While it’s unclear if those advertisers got their money back after pulling ad spend from the podcast, this example proves the importance of checking whether the shows and platforms you advertise on fit your brand. Collecting and analyzing data about digital audio content creators and platforms before advertising could prevent a headache later.
Brand Safety Advertising: What Is Media Intelligence?
Media intelligence is the process of collecting and analyzing data from different advertising channels used in your advertising campaign, helping you realize your brand safety advertising goals. It identifies trends, consumer preferences, purchasing patterns, and potential problems that might jeopardize your brand, helping you make better marketing decisions from the latest data.
In digital audio, media intelligence involves gathering and analyzing data about podcasts, audiobooks, streaming platforms, and digital radio stations. You can use this intelligence to learn more about listening trends, listener behavior, audio engagement, and content performance. For example, learn what type of audiences listen to a popular podcast you want to advertise on. You might track metrics such as podcast episode downloads and social shares to learn whether that content resonates with listeners. You can also carry out sentiment analysis to determine whether listeners view digital audio content as favorable or unfavorable.
Media intelligence is essential for brands and advertisers to utilize. It can help you decide which digital audio content types to advertise your offerings on and prevent you from being associated with inappropriate content like podcasts that offend listeners. Use it to identify potential crises like social media users calling for your brand to be ‘canceled.’
Leveraging Media Intelligence to Ensure Brand Safety in Advertising
Using media intelligence can make your advertising strategies more successful and stop you from advertising in all the wrong places. You can avoid a backlash from audiences and maintain your brand’s reputation by only placing ads with reputable digital audio content creators and platforms.
Backtracks Media Intelligence detects if publisher content or ad creative/advertiser ads contain potentially sensitive topics. You can identify controversial content that includes discussions about sex, drugs, firearms, military conflict, and other topics your audience might find unsuitable or indecent. You can also identify shows that use profanity.
Backtrack’s Media Intelligence platform capabilities allows for a contextual understanding of both audio and video at scale by identifying improper topics through automated transcripts, helping you learn what is said in content. Backtracks then detects the people, organizations, products, dates, and keywords that might suggest content is unsafe to advertise on. That can save you a lot of trouble later!
Backtracks’ Media Intelligence tools aren’t just critical for advertisers but publishers too. They allow both parties to pair up with brand partners that reflect their values. Advertisers ensure publisher content matches the topics, keywords, and ad categories the advertiser wants to associate themselves with in a contextual advertising scenario. Publishers, on the other hand, ensure ad content is complimentary, ads are contextually relevant, and ads are not unsafe for their audience.
Contextually relevant advertising and content can help advertisers and publishers reach the right audiences at the right time and prevent audiences from associating them with potentially unsafe or inappropriate content.
Explore Backtracks Today!
Backtracks supports advertisers, publishers, and platforms that use digital audio advertising to reach audiences. You can access an unparalleled amount of data that helps you maintain your brand image and ensure brand safety.
Ready to use Backtracks Media Intelligence for brand safety in advertising? Partner with us now!
