It’s now been two full years since brand safety surfaced as a major issue. Since the problem has not dissipated, we surveyed consumers to check in on how their perception of social media and brand safety has changed–or how it has not.
That original catalyst, when advertisers realized that their ads on YouTube were showing up next to harmful and offensive content, turning into a boycott of more than 250 advertisers across many outlets including Facebook and Twitter, may be long gone, but the issue persists.
It’s clear that while significant moves have been taken to remedy (or at least alleviate) brand safety concerns from advertisers, the problem has not gone away–far from it. We found last year in our 2018 Brand Safety Study that what advertisers perceive as brand safety is definitely something consumers pick up on. At the time, 60% of consumers were personally encountering “hateful, inappropriate or offensive content” on Facebook alone, and “fake news” also abounded–so it’s no surprise that advertisers were worried about where their ads were appearing in social media and the negative impact it was having on their brand. Perception is everything!
This year's AdColony Brand Safety Survey was distributed globally, with the majority (57%) of respondents from North America, followed by EMEA. Ages ranged from 16 to 75, participants were typically over 35 years old and skewed slightly female.
Some highlights from the findings:
- Mobile users prefer to encounter ads in mobile games (16%) over social media platforms like YouTube (15%), Snapchat (8%) and Instagram (7%). They do still expect and prefer to see ads on Facebook (36%) and Google (18%), though.