Does my brand look good in this?
Why advertisers are crying out for quality environments

By Dan Owens, VP Revenue Partnerships

Subconsciously, most of us constantly craft an external image of ourselves that matches our sense of who we are and how we want others to view us. Whether it’s the clothes we wear, the bars we go to, the music we listen to or the media we consume - either we have found a natural fit for our true self, or we are aspirationally modelling the way we’d like to be perceived.

Media brands carefully design their values and their editorial stance, as well as look and feel, to create a platform for advertising brands to tap into the association or aspiration felt by their audiences. Advertising in any given media environment gives brands the opportunity to be seen supporting and aligning with the content being produced, and it’s this association that forms the basis of advertising. 

But for every upside, there’s always a downside, and programmatic advertising isn’t exempt from this universal rule. The upside has been that agencies and advertising brands can reach a vast number of publishers and sites with the push of a few buttons – something that would have been unimaginable in the time of the IO, when each publisher would need to be contacted in order to agree on pricing and placements. 

The drawback has been that programmatic advertising has focused largely on measurables (CTR, VCR) as a way to determine effectiveness, which has in turn has led to the rise of clickbait content generated using search arbitrage as an audience acquisition strategy - a practice that has only been designed to churn out the highest volume of impressions possible. 

You can probably tell that my early career was spent working in print due to the strong views I still hold that placement, position and brand synergy are fundamental in the creation of an effective and impactful ad campaign. 

Proximity to relevant content has always been the cornerstone of ad effectiveness, but so long as we’re still held to the now antiquated practice of chasing metrics, this has become far less of a priority than it should be. 

The good news is that as the industry continues to mature, an increasing number of innovative companies have tasked themselves with delivering quality experiences that do justice to brands’ carefully constructed premium values. As programmatic becomes perceived less as a performance marketing channel and more as a brand-focused delivery mechanism, we’ll continue to see changes for the good when it comes to ad brand/publisher partnerships.