Artificial Intelligence & Advertising – Brand Safety

As a full-service advertising agency in Seattle, we work to stay on the cutting-edge of digital trends. We specialize in video production, organic and paid search, media buying, and more. In this three-part blog series, we’ll break down the intersections between AI, programmatic advertising, and social media. This post explores brand safety.

Artificial Intelligence enables newfound levels of security, and could essentially eradicate brand safety concerns in 2019 by helping brands serve ads more securely online. Viewability fraud is a type of display fraud where ads are not visible to a user because of shady techniques like ad stacking or ad masking.

Ad stacking is when multiple ads are layered on top of each other in a single ad placement. In this scenario, when the user clicks on the visible ad, it drives up clicks registered for all ads in the stack. Ad masking is when an ad is hidden behind page content, similarly registering false impression and click activity.

Display and viewability fraud have traditionally been major concerns for brands, but because programmatic is continually learning, we can utilize its brand safety segmentation capabilities to ensure that ads are not served fraudulently, or anywhere that may conflict with a brand’s image and goals.

Fraud and viewability feeds within programmatic ensure brands avoid display fraud or impression fraud by providing them real-time protection, blocking IP addresses it has learned to be fraudulent, and filtering out media sources or campaigns with high numbers of impressions and low numbers of actual clicks (likely the result of ad masking).

In regard to brand safety on social media, Facebook’s machine learning algorithms have text and speech recognition capabilities that enable it to rank ads and search results, keeping spam and misleading content like “Fake News” from feeds. These brand safety controls prevent ads from being delivered alongside any content that isn’t conducive to a brand, by enforcing community standards for what is shareable on the platform, allowing relevant targeting capabilities, and providing controls for where ads are shown.

Overall, as AI becomes increasingly sophisticated it’s helping brands serve safer and more secure ads, resulting in a more transparent industry.

Wondering how else AI and advertising will work together in 2019? Don’t hesitate to contact our marketing agency with any questions you may have about digital trends, and stay tuned for our next post on AI’s predictive marketing capabilities.

Are you leveraging AI for your brand or agency? What do you think about AI and brand safety? Share your thoughts and questions in the comments below!