GumGum’s Latest Research Shows Improved Sentiment on Brand Safety among Marketers, but 60 Percent Still Consider Brand Safety a Serious Problem

GumGum, an artificial intelligence company with deep expertise in
computer vision, will release this week the full findings of a November
2018 market research survey, undertaken in partnership with Digiday
Media, that queried the current state of brand safety in the advertising
industry.

The study assessed market sentiment on the question of brand safety and
examined what brands, agencies, and publishers are doing to identify and
reduce exposure to unsafe content. GumGum’s research, which follows on
similar research it conducted in 2017, signals positive trends but also
underscores the fact that brand safety remains a work in progress.

“Unsafe brand exposures were a huge pain point last year, but now we’re
finally seeing more confidence across the board when it comes to brand
safety,” said Phil Schraeder, President and Chief Operating Officer of
GumGum. “The problem is that some of the improvement for brands has come
at the expense of exposure to viable audiences. There’s an overreliance
on highly restrictive methods like blacklisting, when smarter, more
precise brand safety tools—AI-powered contextual analysis, for
example—are available.”

Key findings of the report include:

• 60 percent of industry professionals surveyed said that brand safety
  is a serious problem, a marked improvement from last year’s 90 percent
  figure.
• 91 percent said that their companies have created an internal role
  dedicated to preventing brand safety incidents, compared to just 34
  percent in 2017. 95 percent said that these internal brand safety
  specialists had some success limiting unsafe exposures.
• Respondents deemed blacklists the most effective tool for preventing
  brand safety problems. Unfortunately, twice as many professionals
  reported that blacklists and whitelists have hurt their ability to
  reach audiences than did in 2017.
• The percentage of industry professionals who use image recognition to
  prevent brand safety issues has nearly doubled since last year.
• “Competitor’s branding” and “vulgar language” were ranked the two
  greatest threats to brand safety, while in 2017 the greatest threats
  were “bad news” and “divisive politics”.
• Respondents ranked Twitter the most brand-safe platform, a major
  improvement from its next-to-last ranking in 2017. Facebook also made
  strides: Considered most unsafe platform in 2017, respondents ranked
  it second safest behind Twitter in the November 2018 study.

Click here
for more details and to download the full report.

About GumGum

GumGum is an artificial intelligence company with a focus on computer
vision. The company’s mission is to solve hard problems across a variety
of industries by teaching machines to see and understand the world.
Since 2008, the company has applied its patented capabilities to serve a
variety of industries from advertising to professional sports, with more
to come. For more information please visit: http://www.gumgum.com/

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