Commentary

Is Your Brand Wearing Protection?

As an advertiser of digital media, don't you want your ads to have the right messages at the right time in the right places? It's a fundamental media objective. Well, currently the only thing we have much control over is creating the right message. I'd add the right format to that. We can typically design the right ad unit sizes from the onset of a campaign. However, with today's media landscape constantly sliding, we often have no control over the right time and the right place.

I know this might seem hard to believe or even alarming to some of you. Think about it for a moment, would you? When you or someone on your team creates a media plan, s/he spends a lot of time and energy focusing on where such messages should be seen. That's a given, right? Proper site selection is challenging enough. Deciding where on the site you ads will appear is a real challenge. When you lock up a buy, are you guaranteed a specific location for the placement of your ads?

Look closer, and the answer is probably no. Sure we can buy fixed placements that some call anchor tenants -- opportunities where our ads are fixed in a spot on the site in a given time. However it's rare to find inventory availability to make such a buy.

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Let's talk about ad unit format. The size and format of your ads have a lot to do with where they can be placed. Take video, for instance. Video is cool and hot and here to stay. It's a compelling way to convey your message in a cluttered environment. We media folk used to be worried about video a few years back. Often times we didn't have the budget to produce it. When we did, we had to create non-video options for those on slower connections. Now, luckily enough, just about everyone is on a high-speed connection. But how do we know our videos will be placed next to the right content?

In searching for a solution and doubting there was one, I was turned onto a company called ScanScout . When I did some preliminary research I realized I was familiar with some of the C-level folks over there. Knowing that these guys pioneered several sites' and operations' success, I knew it'd be the real deal.

For those of you who know me or have been following my writings, you know I tend to be a cynic. I get a barrage of press releases thrown in front of me on a daily basis. After a while, many look the same. More often than not I'm weeding to find a good one. So naturally I had to take a deeper look.

The company just sent out a press release a couple days ago that lists details about its offerings. While I can't do the verbiage justice, I'll just share some info from the actual release:

Content Matching technology means more than just brand protection. It ensures that the right ad is shown to the right user at the most opportune time.

Brand Protection: Technology is designed to ensure that advertisers' brand messages will only be seen adjacent to the most appropriate content.

Rich content scanning creates algorithmic intelligence about each video and each user's behavior, enabling far better matching than ever imagined and providing benefit to not just the advertiser, but also to the user and to the publisher.

Unlike pre-roll ad vendors, ScanScout does not require advertisers to limit the length of their video ad creative, because of the innovative and non-intrusive manner in which ScanScout present the ads.

This could open up a while new doors of video possibilities for me and my team. One of our main functions is to protect brands online. At first glance, many don't understand what that means. Online video advertising today is probably the best and most current example. Much of video is like the Wild West. It's hard to control placement. While I'm all for the balance of editorial and advertising, I'm also in dire need of contextual relevance. It's a lot easy to be dubbed intrusive with streaming audio and or video than, say, a banner. Therefore we need a solution in the space.

I'll leave you with a quote from Doug McFarland, ScanScout's CEO: "People have been talking about this with regard to interactive. But, the fact is that there has never been any meaningful brand protection technology or product in any media...If an automotive advertiser bought a certain daypart on the evening news, for example, and their spot followed news of a large pileup on the freeway, that was just part of the risk. What Brand Protector does is mitigate that risk, making the world of UGC and other digital media platforms for brand advertisers."

Well, cheers to "mitigating the risk."

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