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Share on XIn today’s hyper-connected world, every ad placement is a reflection of your brand. Whether it’s on a website, a social feed, or a streaming platform, where your ads appear shapes how consumers perceive you. Yet, with the rise of automated programmatic advertising, ensuring those placements align with your brand’s values has never been more challenging—or more critical.
Imagine this: your brand, painstakingly built on trust and credibility, appears beside sensationalist or inappropriate content. For consumers, that single moment can tarnish years of hard work, leading to disengagement or even distrust. This isn’t just about protecting your brand; it’s about thriving in an ecosystem where perception is everything.
That’s why understanding brand suitability is essential. More than a buzzword, it’s a strategy for ensuring your ads don’t just avoid harm—they actively support and enhance your brand’s identity.
In this article, we’ll break down the concept of brand suitability, explore its benefits, and explain how it goes beyond traditional brand safety to safeguard your reputation and build stronger connections with your audience.
Defining Brand Suitability
Brand suitability is a strategic approach that enables advertisers to place their ads in environments where the surrounding content aligns with their brand’s identity.
Rather than simply avoiding harmful content (as with brand safety), brand suitability is more granular — it considers context, tone, and relevance to ensure ads resonate with the intended audience. Brand suitability goes beyond safety by aligning ads with content that reflects an advertiser’s values and campaign goals. In short, suitability tactics are tailored to meet each brand’s unique needs and preferences.
For example, an ad for high-end watches might be well-placed on a luxury lifestyle website, but less suitable on a budget fashion blog.
Similarly, a sports brand may want to avoid placing ads next to accident news stories, even if the content doesn’t explicitly violate brand safety parameters.
What is Brand Suitability vs. Brand Safety?
While they’re related, and both are critical for a brand’s success, brand safety and brand suitability serve different purposes. Brand safety is a foundational aspect of digital advertising; it protects brands from appearing next to content universally considered harmful, such as hate speech, violence, or misinformation.
Brand suitability, however, builds on this foundation by considering a brand’s specific values and audiences.
It’s about finding the right match between content and brand personality.
To put it simply:
- Brand Safety protects advertisers from risk by avoiding digital content that’s generally recognized as unsafe or harmful.
- Brand Suitability goes a step further than brand safety to align ads with content that’s an ideal fit for a brand’s values or campaign goals.
For instance, brand safety measures might block an ad from appearing on a page with violent content, which would likely be unsafe for any brand. However, brand suitability can go further, blocking content based on specific themes or tones that don’t align with a brand’s image — even if they aren’t considered harmful.
Why Brand Suitability Matters
Unlike traditional brand safety measures, which broadly protect ads from harmful content, brand suitability fine-tunes where ads are displayed based on a brand’s unique values, goals, and expected audience.
Consumers pay close attention to where brands show up online.
A recent survey showed that 65% of U.S. consumers would stop using brands that appear near low-quality content. For brands, this presents a clear mandate to go beyond brand safety and adopt suitable practices that match their audiences’ unique preferences.
Here’s why this matters.
1. Protecting Brand Reputation
Brand suitability provides a more refined safeguard for your brand’s image, helping to prevent ads from being associated with content that may not directly harm but could still tarnish a brand’s reputation.
For example, placing ads for a wellness brand next to content featuring controversial health claims may not be suitable.
2. Increasing Ad Relevance
When ads align with the surrounding content, consumers are more likely to engage. Our neuro-investigative research shows that 74% of consumers are more likely to remember an ad if it relates to the content they’re viewing.
Relevant ad placements help establish a natural connection between the brand and the audience, making ads feel less intrusive and more persuasive.
3. Optimizing Ad Spend and Performance
Brand suitability helps advertisers avoid spending on placements that don’t engage their audience. By targeting ads based on suitability, brands can reduce wasteful spending and boost return on investment.
For instance, a company targeting millennial travelers may benefit from placements on adventure blogs, where engagement is more likely, than on unrelated or unsuitable sites.
4. Building Customer Trust and Loyalty
When consumers see that a brand carefully selects ad placements, they are more likely to view it as a brand with integrity. This can encourage customer loyalty, as consumers appreciate brands that reflect their own values and interests.
5. Increasing Scale
Brand suitability also plays a significant role in increasing scale. Advanced brand safety and suitability tools go far beyond keyword blocklists, allowing advertisers to avoid overblocking content and align their brand more closely with consumer interest and values. Brand suitability tactics provide a key opportunity for advertisers to access long-term, sustainable growth — and advertisers shouldn’t miss out.
Dealing With The Challenges of Brand Suitability
Brand suitability presents a unique set of challenges that go beyond traditional brand safety. It requires brands to carefully consider the environments where their ads appear to ensure alignment with their values and audience preferences.
As digital advertising becomes more complex, companies must navigate two primary hurdles: clearly defining responsibility for brand suitability and effectively implementing nuanced content moderation.
Taking Responsibility
One key challenge in brand suitability is determining who is responsible for ensuring ad placements align with a brand’s image and values. The digital ad ecosystem includes multiple stakeholders — advertisers, media agencies, publishers, and ad measurement and optimization platforms — all of whom play a role in brand safety but may not fully agree on who should be in charge of suitability standards.
This ambiguity can lead to inconsistent application of brand suitability measures, with each party potentially following different guidelines.
Content Moderation
Content moderation also poses significant challenges in maintaining brand suitability. Traditional methods like keyword blocklists may prevent ads from appearing on pages with specific terms but lack the sophistication needed to account for context, cultural nuances, or evolving language.
A simple keyword block may unintentionally filter out suitable content that contains terms with multiple meanings, creating false positives and missed advertising opportunities. For example, an athletic-wear brand might block the word “shot” due to its association with violence, but “shot” is also a word commonly used when referring to sports.
Manual moderation by human reviewers can help bridge these gaps, but it is costly and time-consuming and often falls short in real-time ad placements.
Advancements in contextual AI and machine learning have opened new possibilities for addressing brand suitability by evaluating the broader context of the article in a way the author intended. This development enables advertisers to assess content suitability better and mitigate risks through technology that analyzes and identifies the sentiment and emotion of a webpage.
A Balancing Act
For many brands, striking a balance between safety, suitability, and reach remains challenging, with reports indicating that nearly half of marketers have experienced suitability issues, leading to revenue loss and negative customer reactions.
Establishing a clear definition and standardized approach to brand suitability tailored to each brand’s values and audience expectations is essential for minimizing these challenges.
Moving forward, a unified approach to both brand safety and brand suitability — integrated into every stage of the ad placement process — will be critical to maintaining brand integrity and ensuring a safe, scalable advertising environment.
Implementing a Brand Safety and Suitability Strategy
To get started with brand suitability, brands should clearly define their values and audiences.
Implementing a successful strategy means companies need to:
- Clarify Core Values: Brands need to define their stance on important issues. This foundation guides safe ad placements and prevents associations with content that may clash with the brand’s values.
- Move Beyond Keyword Blocklists: While keyword blocklists were once standard, they often eliminate safe content that aligns with brand values and negatively impact scale. Contextual targeting and avoidance tools can filter pages based on deeper criteria, unlocking safe, relevant spaces for advertising. For example, content containing terms like “pandemic” may still be suitable for many brands, depending on the context.
- Choose Contextual Targeting: Contextual targeting considers the full-page content. This approach ensures ads align with content that complements the brand, such as a beauty brand’s ad in a skincare article or a coffee brand’s ad in a morning routine post. Contextual targeting mitigates brand safety risks and can increase scale by honing in on page relevance.
- Partner with Quality Publishers: Advertisers should work with publishers who offer transparency and adhere to brand safety standards. These trusted publishers provide access to high-quality content while maintaining transparency about where ads will be placed, which is crucial in a programmatic landscape.
- Combine AI with Human Moderation: While AI-driven contextual tools are powerful, human oversight adds an essential layer of scrutiny. Moderators can identify cultural nuances, political connotations, or other sensitivities that algorithms may overlook, particularly in diverse global markets.
- Set Risk Tolerances: Establish a clear threshold for risk by defining what content is acceptable. This long-term strategy aligns ad placements with the brand’s beliefs and target audience preferences, ensuring marketing campaigns consistently adhere to brand safety standards.
Understanding the Impact of Unsafe Ad Placements on Brand Loyalty
For brands today, reputation is about the full customer experience, which includes where ads are seen and how those placements make customers feel.
Unsafe ad placements — those appearing alongside harmful or inappropriate content — can quickly erode consumer trust. A single ad seen in the wrong context can suggest a lack of alignment with customer values, which, for some, may signal deeper issues of brand integrity.
Most consumers have admitted they would hesitate to buy from a brand they perceive as unsupportive of their values or ethics. Therefore, protecting brand safety in ad placements is directly linked to safeguarding the loyalty, trust, and repeat business that brands rely on.
Advertisers who prioritize brand-safe environments are investing in stronger, long-term relationships with customers who feel reassured when they see brands consistently aligned with trustworthy, suitable content.
How to Respond When Brand Safety Incidents Occur
Brand safety incidents happen. What matters most in these situations is how the brand responds. A transparent, timely response reassures customers and demonstrates a brand’s commitment to accountability.
Learning from these incidents is something advertisers should take seriously. Companies can refine their brand safety protocols by analyzing what went wrong, ensuring ad spend is allocated toward quality publishers, and evaluating ad placement strategies.
Proactively responding to and learning from these incidents protects the brand and reinforces its dedication to responsible advertising practices.
Secure Your Brand’s Future With IAS
With AI, machine learning, and contextual intelligence advancements, advertisers can continue to expect increasingly sophisticated tools for precise ad placements. Suitability helps brands stay competitive in a crowded market by building meaningful connections with audiences, optimizing ad spend, and safeguarding brand reputation.
IAS delivers the best of brand safety and suitability and contextual targeting. Our advanced AI-driven technology provides granular control through unparalleled accuracy and precise classification of content.
Reach out to our team today to explore how we can protect your brand and maximize ROI with our industry-leading brand safety and suitability solutions.
