At Trust Metrics, we believe that effective media planning demands that upside opportunity must be considered along with downside risk.
So we focus on discovering the untapped media opportunities for advertisers as much we do on insuring downside protection (brand safety).
Compare it to investing your money. Highest safety investments are treasury bonds. That said, most people are not interested in being crazy risky with their money, but they do look for a little bit better return than one percent.
Going to brands like Johnson’s Baby Shampoo or Mercedes and telling them that their display advertisements might not particularly help the brand, but will be “safe” or “compliant,” seems to be anathema to everything their brand managers and agency partners would work toward.
They want their media efforts to enhance their brands as much as protect them: otherwise why buy brand-based ad at all? Just do couponing and shelf talkers.
Also, we deliver our information to our clients before “the horse has left the barn.” This give our clients the ability to plan and to act on the information. We provide rather than focus on remediation or simple protection or ad blocking.
We do this in a variety of ways by:
- Considering a much, much broader spectrum of issues vs. brand safety.
- Reporting on all IAB Quality Assurance Guidelines as part of our base package to clients.
- Categorizing and contextualizing sites and pages.
- Customizing our ratings on a brand-by-brand basis – what’s valuable to one brand, is different from what’s valuable to another.