Traffic surges during the epidemic, how to place online advertisements?

In the Internet age, advertisements are everywhere. Although programmatic advertising has greatly improved the efficiency and accuracy of advertising , brand safety issues have also spread to countless ports along the branches of the network, appearing on the screen, and leaving large and small brand imprints in the minds of consumers.

Similarly, amid the overwhelming amount of information about the epidemic, TOP has discovered some "crash scenes" on certain apps. Although epidemic-related content is now the focus of national attention and has nothing to do with terrorism, violence or blood, in such a serious and tense atmosphere, these slightly entertaining ads still seem a bit inappropriate and can easily arouse consumer disgust. As a result, many brands have stopped programmatic advertising and chosen to place ads with caution.

Many news and information platforms have advertisements on their epidemic-related content pages that do not match the context.

In fact, when placing advertisements, many advertisers often encounter resource positions that contain accident or disaster content. According to a survey jointly released by foreign media Digiday and AI technology company GumGum, disaster content has become one of the most common factors affecting brand safety.

Data source: Digiday & GumGum

Especially in this special period, with the emergence of epidemic-related content, how brands can safely avoid risks while effectively utilizing the increased traffic due to staying at home has become the key to the epidemic marketing war. Are these brand placement accidents controllable? What is the quality of the traffic that has increased significantly due to the epidemic? What measures should brands take? Based on this, TOP specially interviewed brand safety expert/RTBAsia founder and CEO Fan Qiuhua and Youyi Interactive COO Cai Fang to bring answers to everyone.

Are brand safety incidents controllable?

Normally, online advertisements are placed on browsers, PCs and mobile apps. Currently, from a technical perspective, browsers (including PCs and mobile devices) can monitor keywords and support content classification and avoidance. Advertisers can pre-set a category and avoid brand safety incidents by choosing to block content such as car crashes and accidents.

Currently, advertisers are unable to monitor the content delivered in mobile apps. "Advertisers can ask media platforms to block ads," Cai Fang said, "but from a security perspective, we recommend that advertisers avoid advertising on content platforms with strong advertising and ads that are contextually relevant to the page during this period."

In addition, from the perspective of delivery logic, whether brand safety is controllable is also related to how it is targeted. Fan Qiuhua believes that many media can target content. Advertisers can choose different categories such as news, food, entertainment, etc. to have their ads appear in certain specific categories. "But if you continue to choose within a sub-category, for example, it may be difficult to choose whether it is related to the epidemic in the news category. Usually the media will not provide such fine-grained selection. Only the media on the search platform can be accurate to keywords, but the keywords related to the epidemic are constantly changing and have great uncertainty. Therefore, generally speaking, such fine-grained selection is not made."

"Especially programmatic advertising, which is targeted based on the audience. An advertisement may follow the audience in different environments and may appear in various categories such as news, sports, and entertainment. If it appears in the news related to the epidemic, it may have a negative effect at this time. Therefore, it is safer to suspend the budget or limit the delivery," said Fan Qiuhua.

In fact, many foreign brands have also encountered brand crises due to the inability to fully monitor in-app advertisements. In 2017, The Times discovered that banner ads of well-known brands such as Mercedes-Benz, high-end supermarket chain Waitrose, and The Guardian appeared above terrorism-related video content, and many brands were forced to suspend their campaigns. Since then, YouTube has increased the proportion of content regulators and increased investment in AI to raise the threshold for monetizing content, but the average 450 hours of video uploads per minute still poses a huge challenge to content regulation.

Facebook has given more control, allowing advertisers to view a list of publishers before and after advertising, including Facebook's video inserts and Instant Articles, and update the blacklist accordingly at any time. In addition, Facebook also allows advertisers to choose different levels of filtering systems to ensure that contextual content in the information flow does not endanger brand safety, and cooperates with third-party organizations such as DoubleVerify and OpenSlate to help advertisers better monitor advertisements. But currently, Facebook advertisers can only choose in which categories and where their ads appear, and it is not specific to a certain content publisher or a certain type of content.

Facebook's different levels of information filtering system

How to effectively utilize the traffic value accumulated during the epidemic?

It can be seen that brand safety incidents are not completely controllable and depend more on the media platform and advertising format. Although some brands have completely stopped placing programmatic advertisements, the increase in Internet traffic due to the epidemic is also a rare temptation.

According to QuestMobile data, the total daily usage time of all network users increased by more than 1 billion hours before and after the Spring Festival holiday.

Data source: QuestMobile

In terms of the increase in user scale, mobile games, online videos, short videos, and news information ranked at the top of the list in terms of daily active user growth. Among news and information apps, the daily active user scale of Sina News increased by 110.1% compared with last year's Spring Festival.

Data source: QuestMobile

Combining the opinions of both parties, traffic related to the epidemic mainly comes from two aspects. On the one hand, there are news and information products directly related to the epidemic, such as Tencent News or Dingxiang Doctor Mini Program. These products have attracted a lot of attention directly due to epidemic information; on the other hand, there is an increase in traffic due to the change in behavior of the whole nation staying at home, including online videos, short videos, OTT, games, etc.

Regarding the traffic gathered on news and information platforms during the epidemic, Cai Fang suggested that it is best to place advertisements for public welfare and epidemic-related products. Public welfare advertisements can enhance the brand image, and products such as cleaning, disinfection, and online education that can hit consumers' pain points during this period will be easier to convert.

As for the increase in traffic caused by staying at home, it is safe for all brand advertisements. Fan Qiuhua believes that the value of this traffic can be utilized by brands. "We are also studying the changes in traffic during this period. The absolute quality of advertising traffic during the epidemic and the Spring Festival has improved, and false and invalid traffic on the Internet has decreased. It may be because people cannot move around, and the recent invalid advertising traffic and cheating system behaviors have decreased, which in turn improved the quality of the entire advertising traffic market. This is indeed an opportunity. For example, if the media itself is safe, then the overall quality of the advertising during this period should be improved."

How should brands advertise safely during the epidemic?

So, what should brands pay attention to when advertising during this period? Based on the answers of Cai Fang and Fan Qiuhua, TOP listed the following four points.

1. Avoidance

Under special circumstances, "avoidance" is the most basic means of protecting brand safety, and many brands have already taken such measures.

According to Fan Qiuhua, from a brand safety perspective, content is divided into three categories: safe category, unsafe category, and avoidance category. The "avoidance category" is neither unsafe content nor safe content that can be fully delivered, such as catastrophic events such as earthquakes, wildfires, and epidemics. In this case, it is very difficult for brands to decide whether to deliver or not, and the best strategy is avoidance. “Although there is a lot of traffic and attention, there are also a lot of uncertainties, because everyone has different feelings about what they see, so some advertisers choose to postpone their budgets. Generally speaking, except for some brands with special tones, avoiding it is the best way.”

2. Online creative adjustments

In addition to avoidance, brands should also appropriately adjust online advertising materials to ensure brand safety.

Cai Fang believes that the relevance of advertising materials is critical, especially in extraordinary times, and brands should try to stay away from topics and avoid entertainment. "Recently, some of our fast-moving consumer goods advertisers have taken their ads offline. It's not because they can't run during the epidemic, but because the previously run materials were not relevant, and they need to make some corresponding adjustments to the materials before putting them online again."

3. Choose relatively safe media for placement

In addition, brands can evaluate and judge the safety level and formulate delivery strategies through the attributes of different media and advertising formats.

Generally speaking, OTT has the highest security level because it has less negative content, few opportunities for interaction, and therefore has gained the favor of many advertisers during this extraordinary period when "everyone is at home." According to the data shared by Cai Fang, compared with the same period data from January 5 to January 14, the OTT delivery volume increased by 165% from January 25 to February 7.

From the perspective of media categories, brands can choose categories that are far away from information, such as video, short video, music, sports, etc. These are also the APP categories with the best traffic growth during the epidemic.

From the perspective of ad placement, ad placements such as patches and splash screens that have no association with the context are also safer than information flows and banners.

"Advertising needs to be adjusted based on changes in consumers' media habits. During this period, OTT is the new valuable traffic. In addition, offline consumption has been weakened, so advertising should be directed to e-commerce or mainly online, so that the advertising effect can be better amplified," Cai Fang added.

4. Establish a long-term brand safety strategy mechanism

Of course, the epidemic is only one of the potential factors that endanger brand safety. Improving one's own brand safety strategy in the long term is the most effective solution.

"Many brands already have perfect brand safety strategies and corresponding solutions for challenges in different scenarios. In this case, the temporary adoption of strategies may not be effective. Brand safety strategies need to be planned for the long term and considered as a whole. Today is the epidemic, and there may be other accidents tomorrow," said Fan Qiuhua.

Author: Topmarketing

Source: Topmarketing