Brand equity is a precious thing. It takes years to build and can be damaged in a heartbeat by unforeseen events, like product breakdown, and ill-considered marketing strategy. Smart marketers exercise control over how, where, and when their product or service is seen in order to safeguard their brand investment.

The tools and partnerships that marketers must rely on to buy media and execute programmatically preclude the kind of control that marketers expect and exercise in other channels. The result is that they cannot get a comprehensive list of sites where their ads appear. While they can require white- and black lists, without the final recap they have no way to determine whether or not their requirements were met.  

What’s more, marketers can no longer assume that their ad placements within walled gardens won’t be compromised. The challenge of determining what is and isn’t valid content continues.

In the past few months, several major brands have conceded that, unbeknownst to them, their ads have appeared on inappropriate sites. They learned of these placements not from their programmatic partners, but from discontented customers, which is a marketer’s worst nightmare.

This is not a situation that can be changed overnight. It’s a challenge that marketers must lay down to themselves and their programmatic partners in order to protect the brand equity they have so thoughtfully built over time.

Read this report (client access only) to learn more about how to protect your brands from the wrong context, and let us know what you think. Fake News: More Proof That Advertisers Must Choose Quality Over Quantity