By: Madison Johansen

Swipe Left for your Brand Reputation Strategy

It has been a few months since the big blowout with YouTube’s brand safety concerns – and we are now starting to see big brands getting back on the YouTube wagon again. As we mentioned in a previous brand reputation management blog post, being aware of how and where your ads are displaying on the web is a pretty crucial aspect of any brand reputation strategy.

Now, you may be asking, why are brands already going back to YouTube after what happened just a few months ago? Well for one, YouTube is a huge part of most brands’ advertising programs and there really isn’t a viable replacement with the same scale. And two, they did make some necessary changes, like increasing the requirements of channels participating in its YouTube Partner Program, and hiring “significant numbers” of employees to focus on this area as well as develop artificial intelligence tools to better vet content for its nonpremium ads.

There has also been word that they could be adopting a swipe-next gesture similar to Snapchat Stories or Instagram Stories. This would essentially take the place of the standard pre-roll ad and allow the user to swipe left if the interstitial ad doesn’t suit them. In theory, it would also help with the brand-to-content associations users may make when the ad seems to be “presenting” the video they are watching. This is just one of the potential updates looming in the coming months…

Ad Blocking and Exclusion Categories

Google is rolling out some changes to its exclusion categories for ads running on the Google Display Network. They are grouping some of the existing categories together along with adding a few new ones such as “sensitive social issues” and “content suitable for families”. This is all in an effort to simplify the management of exclusions and align Display and Video controls – further helping you with your brand reputation strategy!

Along with these minor adjustments, Google may also be releasing an ad blocker for Chrome. Since a large portion of internet users are already using some sort of ad blocker, you would think Google wouldn’t want to hurt their own business by adding to the fire. This new plugin would be more of a “filter” as opposed to a blocker – filtering out the most annoying and invasive ads such as pop-up ads, autoplay ads with sound, prestitial ads, full-screen scroll over ads, etc. Although Google essentially does this in its Ad Experience Report, this could really cause some advertisers and publishers to rethink their display advertising approach.

Snaps for Brand Safety

Snapchat does already have the swipe-next gesture in place, but soon brands will have more levers and controls to properly manage where their ads appear within the mobile app and avoid any major dings to their brand reputation strategy. Advertisers can now choose to have their ads run only between regular people’s Stories (non-curated content) or only within the Stories and Shows produced by Snapchat and media partners (curated content). On top of that, brands can choose to exclude their ads from appearing adjacent to certain types of content categories.

In the End

Google and Snapchat may be taking the right steps here, but in the end it is still your job to develop and maintain your brand’s reputation strategy. Please take a look at some of the pointers we give you in our blog posts and feel free to contact us if we can be of assistance in your strategy development.