Advancing Brand Safety

March 9, 2023 | By Catherine Perloff Research from GumGum coincides with mounting buyer pressure. Ahead of the upfront season, buyers are still grappling with a lack of transparency around what they are buying in connected TV environments. It’s a problem further exacerbated by new research on ads in kids’ content. During the broadcast of an animal cartoon film, there was an ad for a wine company. In another break, a casino was advertised. In the same movie, ads for a testosterone-boosting supplement aired. These examples are not random occurrences. Research from contextual ad-tech firm GumGum found that 20% of all ad breaks…

  Almost a year into his tenure as global CEO of Omnicom Media Group (OMG), Florian Adamski (known by colleagues and friends as Flo) still has to force himself to stay above the fray of details and increasing complexity of the modern media agency business. He confesses to always being a meticulous detail guy, but having 22,000 employees worldwide, and 380 different specialties all ultimately reporting to him, necessitates stepping back from the granular day-to-day of his remit. Most recently the CEO of OMD Worldwide (part of OMG) and before that head of OMG Germany, Adamski worries less today about…

Snack-bar maker Kind earlier this year enlisted the help of geo-targeted TikTok ads and TikTok influencers to help it attract consumers to a pop-up farmers market hidden behind a faux vending machine in New York City. The Mars Inc.-owned brand credits the social-media app for a surge in attendance: Roughly 8,000 people showed up—a far cry from the 500 who attended a similar New York event Kind hosted in 2019, which the company promoted using Meta Platforms Inc.’s Instagram.

Tech companies, cross-industry groups and trade bodies are all trying to figure out connected TV’s teething problems. Last year, advertisers spent an estimated $10.3 billion in connected TV programmatic display ads, an 82% increase from 2020, according to eMarketer. Yet for such a big chunk of change, advertisers often don’t know much about the shows or other ads their spots are running against, which can lead to ad frequency issues, wasted budgets and—at worst—fraud. With a fragmented landscape of sellers, advertisers are buying with inconsistent visibility. The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Tech Lab is taking a stab at addressing some…

Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook) is giving brands more control over where their ads appear in NewsFeed environments. On Thursday, the company revealed a brand suitability verification tool for advertisers in the NewsFeed and expanded its topic inclusion controls for brands that advertise in English. The controls, found in the “Ads Preferences” settings tab, will allow advertisers to prevent Facebook from running their ads against three topic categories — news and politics, debated social issues and crime and tragedy — in the NewsFeed. In early testing, Meta found that advertisers that excluded the news and politics category were…