Imagine you are a major (or minor) brand advertiser. You wake up in the morning, brew some coffee and, still in your PJ’s, break out your laptop to see what is happening in the digital world.
You are a happy person this morning. It’s 7am, the sun is out, no phone calls or meetings for another few hours, the coffee is starting to kick in and you know that out there in the internet world your ads are reaching millions of people while you sleep, while you’re in the shower and, in a few hours, while you’re in your car on your way to work.
You sliced and diced your target audience with the newest tools from behavioral, semantic or contextual online advertising networks or platforms, you produced the most engaging online ad creative with the most expensive digital advertising agency that has racked up more AAAA, ANA, IAB, ARF awards than the competition, you went on a digital media buying spree that ensures that your slick interactive ads will be seen by tens of millions of people in the right demographic across hundreds of relevant online publications.
And then, if you’re a marketer at ExxonMobil or Sprint, you see your motor oil and cell phone ads wrapped around an article about a kid who was killed in a motorcycle accident, like two giant book ends that scream out, “look at me, I have no tact.”
Goodbye happy morning.
The funny thing is, I am your demographic. I put oil in the car yesterday, and I was working on my motorcycle too. I’m even about to change the oil today! How prescient that you got your brand in front of me at just the right time.
But…
How effective is your advertising when it seems like the most inappropriate thing to peddle in relation to the content I’m reading?
Ad verification will become a cost of doing business in the digital world. It may add a penny per thousand impressions (my numbers are arbitrary), but the cost will be worth it to protect your brand from appearing next to content that makes me, as a consumer, think you’re a douchebag for advertising your motor oil or blazing fast 4G cellphone network next to an article in an online publication about a kid who died while going too fast with your motor oil in his motorcycle.
A big debate right now within the interactive advertising industry and the online publishing world is who incurs the additional cost to verify that a brand’s advertisements appear next to appropriate content and, therefore, have the best chance to be effective? Should it be the advertiser? The ad agency? The publisher? The ad network?
I don’t know the answer, but do know that ad verification will become a necessary incurred cost of online advertising.
When a brand is advertising on a website, the last thing it wants is for me to rant about its’ tasteless ad placement.
A word of warning to all you media buyers out there, it makes you look foolish when you don’t protect your client’s brand online. I’m talking to you agency of record for Sprint and ExxonMobil.
By the way, I was thinking of other content I wouldn’t want my brand next to and did a search for “Brandon Spikes sex tape”. For those of you who don’t know, Brandon Spikes is a New England Patriot’s rookie linebacker who, surprise surprise, made a sex tape that “accidentally” leaked. I clicked on a Boston Herald article. It’s nice to know that at a time when I’m reading about one Boston sports figure’s adventures in amateur porn, I can learn more about the new Boston Red Sox Mastercard from Bank of America!
For fun, spend the next five minutes searching for content you wouldn’t want your brand to appear next to and then see who the lucky advertiser is whose advertisement is running next to articles about death, starvation, oil spills or b-list celebrity sex tapes.
A lot of brands may want to rethink their online advertising program.
