A recent Digiday piece talked about marketers ‘living in constant fear of the screenshot’ - the juxtaposition of their brand with undesirable content. “Marketers clearly care about this brand safety problem,” said Danny Rogers, chief technology officer for disinformation watchdog Global Disinformation Index. “But the tools they are sold are so inadequate and their understanding of the open web is so limited that the outcome of it all is 180 degrees from the intent.”



 

1. They don’t have the highly dynamic tracking or legal knowledge to spot high-risk websites running pirate or fraudulent content. As long as their keyword search checks out, they will still put a brand’s advertising on an illegal and dangerous domain. Every day, we see numerous examples of ads on pirate websites that brand safety companies have waved through, including sites showcasing stolen Premier League streams and bogus blogs and e-commerce domains set up as fronts for pirate activity.
2. Keyword blocking can easily find fault with respectable and trustworthy publishers and content, depriving an advertiser of valuable opportunities and millions of eyeballs.

 

Even brands who are satisfied with their brand safety companies in other respects need extra eyes on the piracy problem. This kind of brand threat is astonishingly dynamic and requires both constant, highly specialised internet vigilance and legal analysis. Pirates are ingenious and devious, and this is an increasingly substantial criminal business .



Unlike the companies that depend solely on contextual word analysis to spot trouble, White Bullet uses AI to crawl the web night and day, maintains dynamic lists of the web’s unsafe publishers and draws on vast legal experience, with vastly more robust results. 



Brands shouldn’t depend on inadequate brand safety tools to protect themselves online. Get in touch to understand the real risks of online piracy and the real remedies.