While digital marketing offers incredible targeting opportunities for advertisers, it comes with its own set of complexities. On the Web, organizations are therefore at risk of making missteps that can have a negative impact on their reputation.
The automation of certain advertising processes, such as programmatic buying, also brings reputational risks for brands. This is the case of those who have seen their banners on disreputable sites, and this against their will.
A focus on customer behavior rather than the media brand
What causes a banner ad to end up on an undesirable site and how can a brand minimize the chances of this happening? We asked these questions to Jean-François Renaud, president and co-founder of Adviso.
How does this phenomenon occur? To this first question, Jean-François Renaud explains that it is the result of targeting that is now more focused on the audience than on specific sites. In other words, the objective of advertising algorithms is to find (or find again) a target customer no matter where he is. If it detects a priori that a user might be interested in buying a pair of sneakers of a certain brand, it will follow him and offer him this product no matter where the user is on the Web. This can include undesirable sites.
There are several ways to reduce this risk, although none of them are perfect. First, an advertiser can choose to opt out. The advertiser, along with its agency if applicable, will determine the style of sites it does not want to appear on. For some categories of sites (e.g. pornographic sites), there is no doubt that an advertiser does not want to be there. For others, the choice to exclude depends on the values and products sold by the advertiser.
However, since there are so many websites, many are created every day, and those on the exclusion lists sometimes try to find ways to get off the list, it is virtually impossible to maintain a clean list.
The other possible approach is to operate by inclusion. In this case, you determine which sites you want to be on rather than excluding those you don’t want to be on. However, this method is more conservative and risks depriving the advertiser of a presence on a host of sites that could potentially perform well for its campaigns.
Other factors can encourage the appearance of banners on undesirable sites, including the resale of advertising space to third-party networks, for example Google Display. In this case, the inclusion and exclusion rules are likely to be lost and not taken into account.
Express your limits well
Jean-François Renaud adds that it is important for an advertiser to be able to clearly express to its digital marketing agency what its values and limits are in terms of ad placement. The agency must understand which sites you are willing to appear on and which ones you do not want to be associated with. Good communication between an advertiser and its agency is therefore essential.
Nevertheless, Adviso’s president reminds us that there is no such thing as zero risk. In spite of all your efforts, you can’t avoid ending up on an undesirable site.
