From the rise of #FakeNews to the Facebook Ad Boycott, brand safety on social media is naturally a concern for brands getting just started on social or venturing into paid advertising for the first time.

Paid advertising on social media has incredible reach - but as this scales, it can be harder and harder to control or understand where your brand appears and what it appears next to. 

However, nearly 90% of consumers feel that brands bear responsibility for ensuring their ads run beside content that is safe, and half of social media users changed their opinion of a brand when the brand’s ad was displayed next to inappropriate content, so it’s crucial to put in the groundwork to ensure your ads are running next to content that won’t damage your brand or confuse your ad’s message.

Defining Brand Safety for Your Brand

Brand safety is subjective; what might be risky for a brand like KFC or Greggs is completely different from what’s risky for NatWest. 

If you have a comprehensive social media strategy and guidelines in place, you should have a good foundation for defining what is or isn’t safe for your brand (and if you don’t have a social strategy in place, here’s a good place to start).

When defining brand safety, it’s important to look at a number of factors in relation to your brand’s message and values. 

What’s the antagonist to your brand?

Let’s say you’re a burger chain. Having your advert appear on an article about climate change is likely to work against you.

What juxtaposes your brand? 

Similarly, you wouldn’t want an ad for your burgers appearing next to content about obesity or heart disease.

What would reduce the impact of your content?

Having and ad for your burger chain appear mid-roll during a video exposing animal cruelty will surely reduce your impact and raise some eyebrows.

With those questions in mind, you can build in brand safety precautions through targeting. The more flexible the targeting options, the better the level of brand safety, allowing you to choose and view the specifics of who you are targeting, topics you want your brand to be associated with, and types of content and their sensitivity level; each element helping to show where your content might be placed in your audience’s feeds.

Mitigating risk by platform

Different platforms have different brand safety risks.

Unsurprisingly, marketers ranked LinkedIn as the most brand safe platform, due largely to its professional nature, but also due to its number of brand safety features. 

LinkedIn prioritises publisher’s that are most trusted with their user base, tested and scored by independent partners to ensure these are publishers preferred by real people, rather than bots. You also have the ability to exclude publishers and topics based on their IAB category, to ensure you block your content from appearing next to posts or videos which might damage your campaign or brand.

Given their seemingly constant presence in the press, it’s also not surprising that Facebook has been ranked as the least brand safe platform by marketers - but that doesn’t mean it’s not safe to run ads on.

Facebook has been making changes to their brand safety tools following the scrutiny they faced during the Facebook Ad Boycott over their approach to responsible media.

Advertisers now have a number of ways to have more granular control over where their content appears, including inventory options that allow advertisers to include all eligible content, exclude sensitive content, or exclude both moderate and sensitive content.

Like most social platforms, Facebook also gives you the ability to block specific publishers and topics. They also publish a white list of approved publishers, which allow brands to select channels that meet their specific suitability criteria. 

In Summary 

All major social networks have brand safety tools built into their campaign management system for advertisers to hone on in where they want their ads to appear - and importantly, where they don’t want them to.

In order to get the most out of these tools, and protect your brand from unsafe exposure, you need to know the ins and outs of your brand and audience and understand what publishers and topics align well, and create block lists and exclusions for those that work against your brand, message, or audience’s values.