The Brand Safety Institute and the industry’s corporate-focused Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG) jointly released a new white paper highlighting the confusion around the brand safety issue and offering several recommendations for industry action to address it. Based on detailed interviews with more than 20 senior executives with leading companies across the digital advertising ecosystem, the BSI/TAG white paper found significant disagreement over the scope of the brand safety problem, as buyers felt it included brand ROI issues like ad fraud, while sellers tended to limit it to association with inappropriate content.
Based in part on feedback from those interviews, the TAG/BSI white paper offered several recommendations to improve industry-wide standards around brand safety, including:
Adoption of industry best practices around supply chain issues, including those offered by the MRC, IAB, and TAG;
Creating a new position of “Brand Safety Officer” dedicated to addressing these challenges; and
Ensuring that the internal brand safety lead at every company has the education, training, and resources necessary to fulfill their responsibilities.
