The Ozone Project talks to The Drum about on the consequences of keyword blocking for publishers and advertisers…
Friday 31st January - first published on The Drum
Below is the full response from Ozone’s CEO, Damon Reeve:
Why are certain keywords blocked? Is this a blunt solution or vital to brand safety?
To understand why certain keywords are blocked it’s important to differentiate between restrictions placed for brand safety and those for brand suitability. There are some articles that are not appropriate for any brand to be associated with - e.g. a catastrophic event - and this is what brand safety should deal with.
Brand suitability adds an extra ‘protective’ layer on top of brand safety and is entirely subjective - the advertiser can decide what’s right for them. For example, placement alongside Brexit articles content may worry one brand, but not another.
Challenges arise in managing brand safety and suitability for two reasons: 1) the way in which brand safety is managed and who is managing; and 2) the tools that are used to manage it.
The responsibility to manage brand safety is generally delegated by a brand to an agency, who will operate on the conservative side to preserve the client relationship. They are overworked and so rarely will maintain blocklists which end up being long and cumbersome.
The tools available to brands and agencies to manage brand safety are primarily keyword based. A keyword list solution is too blunt and one dimensional, failing to understand the context and environment a given keyword appears in. A consequence of this is that text heavy environments are disproportionately penalised, ironically with a greater impact on higher quality, editorially-governed environments. The knock-on effect is that advertiser budgets are pushed onto long-tail unregulated sites, perversely increasing the risk for the brand
What's the route to sorting out the issue?
There is a two-fold approach to sorting the issues generated as a result of keyword blocklists. Firstly, education - it is vital that those responsible for the creation of long, unmaintained blocklists understand the unintended consequences these can have for their campaigns.
Secondly, through investment in more sophisticated tools that can better understand the context and environment in which an ad is appearing. Tools that not only rely on keywords, but that have the capability to interpret the image and video content appearing on a page.
At The Ozone Project we have invested heavily in natural language processing and contextual understanding to help brands unlock access to audience that would otherwise be blocked through the use of keyword tools.
With Chromium update, is this a quick win or something that goes on backburner?
Google’s announcement to withdraw support for third-party cookies on Chrome is a significant move, albeit with very little detail provided at this stage as to what this will mean. However, it has ensured that the entire industry is now on Google’s roadmap; great for them, much less so for everyone else. What we do know is that the impact of the announcement will transform programmatic advertising as we know it today, although it’s too early to say exactly how.
As a result of Google’s announcement, we will see even greater focus on what contextual understanding and targeting can deliver for advertisers. This shift will only further highlight the implications of improper use of keyword blocklisting on digital campaigns and the importance of sorting the issue to help buyers reach audiences in brand safe and suitable text-based contexts.
