SSPs are the go-to for brand safety in programmatic buys. But should they be?

Programmatic in-app advertising has become a hot favourite among advertisers. While there is interest from brands, a study titled "The state of programmatic in-app advertising in APAC" commissioned by PubMatic and done by Forrester showed that APAC advertisers rely on supply-side platforms (SSPs) to alleviate the perceived challenges with programmatic advertising. More specifically, 35% of the 472 advertisers in APAC surveyed said SSPs could offer access to audience data for targeting, while 33% said they can offer performance metrics guarantees. These include cost per completed view, cost per impression, and fill rate. Rounding off the top four options were providing brand safety guarantees (31%) and providing cross-channel attribution platforms (30%).

When it comes to brand safety, PubMatic's senior director, mobile, Lashanne Phang (pictured), told MARKETING-INTERACTIVE that an SSP's role is to curate suitable content according to advertiser-defined parameters. However,

SSPs do not control or operate the actual content so can’t assume full responsibility for taking control of brand safety.

Instead, SSPs should be working with their buy-side partners to understand needs, and their brand safety floors, and then leverage internal inventory quality teams and industry tools to ensure they are curating inventory that meets those needs.

Over the years, there have been instances of brands falling victim to unfortunate ad placements. In Singapore, Chubb also encountered an unfortunate ad placement in January when its ads were found next to an online article covering the death of two young boys on The Straits Times in Singapore. Safe to say, brand safety is still a concern for brands. However, the term might mean different things to different advertisers, said Phang. What is considered brand safe for an edgy urban streetwear brand may not be considered brand safe for a global FMCG brand. So, it is important for advertisers to decide what brand safety means to them and to communicate it to their supply and tech partners such as DSPs and SSPs. It is then up to these parties to enforce what the advertisers have defined.

"It’s also important that advertisers work with partners whose inventory quality standards and procedures they can trust. If you’re an advertiser, you need to be asking your supply partners what checks and balances they employ when onboarding new publishers. Do they have a dedicated Inventory Quality team that thoroughly investigates all new publishers? What standards do they have in place? What third party vendors are they working with?" she added.

(Read also: Study: APAC programmatic mobile in-app advertising spikes with 4 key investment areas)

Aside from ads showing up next to inappropriate content, brands should also keep an eye on the other types of advertisers on a publishing platform. With branding and association being even more important in today's world, no company would want their ads show up next to a malicious one. In this case, Phang said a malicious ad can mean "more than just being dodgy but also harmful", injecting viruses or supporting phishing attempts.

"This is just as important for publishers. Their brand image can be tarnished by having unsavoury ads show up on their site, which is why ad quality matters and publishers should be thinking about that," she explained.

Last year, the IAB Tech Lab unveiled a transparency initiative called Buyers.Json which aims to reduce the amount of malvertising that works its way through the supply chain to publishers and their audiences. The initiative is designed to help publishers better monitor spend on their inventory, solve many forms of malvertising, and ultimately aims to protect publishers and their audiences. If a buyer is responsible for a malicious ad, that buyer can be blocked entirely. Publishers and their audiences obviously benefit from not having malicious ads served on their sites, but legitimate advertisers do too. Phang explained:

One of the most widely abused functions of malicious advertising is to pull a user away from the publisher page and the legitimate ads on the page.

Is data prioritised over brand safety?

While brand safety might be an important aspect for brands, PubMatic's study found that it was the second selection criteria for advertisers when choosing a publisher. Interestingly, the first was access to publisher data for targeting (57%). 

While it might seem as though brands now prioritise data over brand image, Phang explained that these numbers do not point to one being more important than the other, rather that both are top concerns for advertisers. "The numbers here are not mutually exclusive and their proximity suggests both are almost equally important," she added.

That said, there always needs to be a balance when it comes to data. According to Phang, mobile app and the amount of data available for advertisers to use has naturally led to the format being widely used for performance campaigns, but what this research shows is that increasingly advertisers are seeing the benefits of running brand campaigns on mobile app too.

This trend spells good news for the industry especially in light of Apple's iOS14 privacy changes and Google's Android ad track privacy change announced last month. These changes will undoubtedly impact performance spend and according to Phang, make mobile app advertising less useful for targeted conversion-based and click-based campaigns. "Conversely, brand campaigns that don’t have strong calls to action and aren’t measured that way so will be less impacted by the changes," Phang said.

In fact, Apple's privacy changes has already impacted some players in the industry, with the main one being Meta. CFO Dave Wehner said during its latest earnings call that the impact of the iOS overall as a headwind on its business in 2022 is on the order of US$10 billion. 

On the other hand, while Snap said during Q3 2021 that the change made it more difficult for its ad partners to measure and manage their ad campaigns for iOS, CFO Derek Andersen said during its Q4 2021 earnings call that its direct response advertising businses began to recover from the impact of the iOS platform changes quicker than anticipated. In fact, the business was once again the largest driver of Snap's growth that quarter. That said, Andersen still expects a couple more quarters for its ad partners to build full confidence in Snap's new measurement solutions when it comes to navigating the iOS platform changes.

Not surprisingly, respondents for PubMatic's report also feel the heat from Apple's privacy changes, with 37% listing this as a challenge when it comes to programmatic in-app advertising. The top challenge was data privacy limiting the amount of data they can collect (39%). Meanwhile, 33% said a poor perception of in-app advertising, in general, posed a challenge to them. 

While the research did not delve deeper into what those poor perceptions are, Phang explained that from its ongoing conversations with media buyers the key reasons seem to be the fragmented nature of the mobile app ecosystem and buyers being unfamiliar with mobile app publishers.

"They all know the main web publishers because they use those sites every day and have grown up with them, but often don’t know who an app publisher is even if they use some of the apps they’ve developed," she said. Also, the "horror stories" about rampant ad fraud on mobile app also result in poor perception. "While this is not as true as it used to be, and IAB initiatives such as app.ads.txt and OpenMeasurement SDK have really cleaned up the ecosystem, the perception still persists," she added.

Photo courtesy: 123RF